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BOHEMIA UNDER HAPSBURG 
MISRULE 



BOHEMIA UNDER 
HAPSBURG MISRULE 



A Study of the Ideals and Aspirations of the Bohemian and 

Slovak Peoples, as they relate to and are affected 

by the great European War 



EDITED BY 

THOMAS CAPEK 

Author of "Slovaks of Hungary," etc. 




New York Chicago Toronto 

Fleming H. Revell Company 

London and Edinburgh 




^O^NS* 



O*^ 



Copyright, 1915, by 
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 



New York: 158 Fifth Avenue 

Chicago: 125 N. Wabash Ave. 

/■■\^\ Toronto: 25 .Richmond St., W. 

y \ London: 21 Paternoster Square 

\^ Edinburgh: 100 Princes Street 

C 



0/ (f^-P 

JUL 3 1915 



©GI,A406564 



Bebtcateb 

To the Cause of 
Bohemian-Slovak Freedom 



" / trust in God that the 
Government of Thine affairs will again 
revert to Thee, O Bohemian People ! ' ' 

John Amos Comenius. 

(In exile.) 



PREFACE 

THE object of this volume is to make Bohemia 
and her people better known to the English- 
speaking world. The average English- 
man's and American's knowledge of Bohemia is 
very vague. It is only within recent years that 
Anglo-American writers have begun to take a 
deeper interest in her people. Among the more 
prominent students of Bohemian contemporary life 
should be mentioned: Will S. Monroe, Emily G. 
Balch, and Herbert Adolphus Miller, in the United 
States; and A. R. Colquhoun, Richard J, Kelly, 
F. P. Marchant, James Baker, Wickham H. Steed, 
Charles Edmund Maurice, W. R. Morfill, and R. 
W. Seton- Watson in England. Count Liitzow has 
written in English a number of works on Bohemian 
matters. 

While it is yet too early to foresee the precise 
results of the Great War, one may judge of coming 
events by the shadows they cast before them. A 
close observer of the Austrian shadows is justified 
in thinking that the Bohemian people, so long sup- 
pressed, stand on the threshold of a new destiny. 
This destiny points to the restoration of their an- 
cient freedom. If the Allies win — and every loyal 

7 



8 PREFACE 

son of the Land of Hus fervently wishes that 
their arms might prevail, notwithstanding the fact 
that Bohemian soldiers are constrained to fight for 
the cause of the two Kaisers — Bohemia is certain 
to re-enter the family of self-governing European 
nations. The proclamation which the Russian 
Generalissimo addressed to the Poles may be said 
to apply with equal force to the Bohemians : " The 
hour has sounded when the sacred dream of your 
fathers may be realized. . . . Bohemia will be 
born again, free in her religion, her language, and 
autonomous. . . . The dawn of a new life begins 
for you. ... In this glorious dawn is seen the sign 
of the cross, the symbol of suffering and the resur- 
rection of a people.' 

At the close of the Franco-Prussian War, 
Frenchmen erected in the Place de la Concorde in 
Paris the Statue of Strassburg, which they have 
kept draped, as a sign of mourning for the loss of 
their beloved Alsace-Lorraine. The Bohemians 
have grieved for their motherland much longer 
than the French for the " Lost Provinces." 
Bohemia put on her mourning garb in 1620, the 
year her rebel army was defeated by the imperial- 
ist troops of Ferdinand IL, at the Battle of White 
Mountain near Prague, the capital of the kingdom. 
May it not be hoped that the joyous moment is near 
when her sons can substitute for the black and yel- 



PREFACE 9 

low of Austria the red and white of Bohemia — the 
colors that Charles Havlicek loved so well. " My 
colors are red and white," declared this fearless 
patriot to his Austrian tormentors. " You can 
promise me, you can threaten me, but a traitor 
I shall never be." 

Never during the three hundred years of Aus- 
trian misrule were conditions so propitious for 
throwing off the shackles of oppression as now. 
In the darkest hours of national humiliation, the 
children of Hus and of Komensky (Comenius) did 
not despair. " We existed before Austria," 
Palacky used to tell them, " and we shall survive 
her." May not the words of the " Father of his 
Country," as Palacky was affectionately called by 
his countrymen, come true, in view of what is tak- 
ing place in the Hapsburg Monarchy to-day ? 

With what form of government would Bohemia 
make her re-entry into the European family of na- 
tions — as a free state, as a dependency of Russia, 
as a ward of the Allies, or incorporated in a federa- 
tion of the states remaining to the Hapsburg Em- 
pire ? 

It was a favorite theory of Palacky that the Aus- 
trian nations would, for their own protection, have 
to create an Austria, if she were ever destroyed. 
But what Palacky has said may no longer be true, 
because the events of 1914 have created issues and 



10 PREFACE 

opened up possibilities undreamt of in his times. 
Palacky, let it be understood, had in mind a Con- 
federated Austria that should form a bulwark for 
small races against German expansion from the 
north and the west. 

It has been intimated that the Allies might agree 
to create Bohemia and Hungary as independent 
buffer states to curb German aggression, just as 
Belgium and Holland are buffer states between 
Germany and France. If this war has shown any- 
thing, it has demonstrated the usefulness of a small 
state like that of the Belgians. Albania, it will be 
recalled, had been brought into being by Austria 
and Italy, not for humanitarian reasons, we may 
be sure, but to menace and weaken Serbia, of 
whose growth they were jealous. 

Another probability is that Russia might de- 
mand, as one of the prizes of war, the cession of the 
northern part of Austria-Hungary, which is wholly 
Slavic. She might contend that she could not carry 
out her traditional policy of guardianship of the 
Slavs, unless her kinsfolk came under her influence, 
if not actually under her rule. 

Francis Josef waged two wars in the past, both 
of which ended disastrously for the empire. Yet 
from both of these wars good has come to his sub- 
jects. The campaign in Italy, which resulted in 
the defeat of the Austrians at Magenta and Sol- 



PREFACE 11 

ferino in 1859, dealt a severe blow to the bureau- 
cracy, liberating, incidentally, the Italians who were 
trampled under foot by Radecky, As a result of 
the war with Prussia in 1866, the Magyars came to 
their own. Hungarian autonomy dates from 1867. 
Now it is the turn of the Bohemians to profit from 
Austria's predicament. 

Self-government is not only an ideal but a neces- 
sity to Bohemians. Why should Bohemia, in addi- 
tion to paying for her own needs, make good the 
deficits of lands which are passive, and in whose 
domestic affairs she has no greater interest than the 
State of New York has, for instance, in the local 
constabulary of Nevada? Year after year Bo- 
hemians justly complain that Vienna wrings mil- 
lions in taxes from them that it spends on lands 
that are passive. It is partly this feature of the 
case, the high revenue flowing from the Bohemian 
Kingdom, which has made Vienna hostile to the 
home rule agitation. Is it reasonable to suppose, 
however, that if Austria could not wholly suppress 
the national aspiration of Bohemians in times of 
peace, under normal conditions, she is more likely 
to accomplish it if she returns home from the war 
exhausted, humiliated, perchance vanquished? 

It may seem hazardous to forecast Austria's 
future in the event of the Allies winning. But this 
much is already apparent, that the Austria of 19 14, 



la PREFACE 

the government of which rested on the mediaeval 
idea that one white race was superior to another 
white race, is doomed to perish. Austria needed 
a crushing blow from without, such as a lost war, 
to send toppling the ramshackle structure that has 
menaced for so long a time the security of the 
Slavic inhabitants. For, though rent by internal 
discord, the monarchy obviously lacked forces 
powerful enough to effect its own redemption. If 
the Teutonic forces are beaten, the logical sequel 
will be the breakdown of the Germanic hegemony 
and a corresponding rise of Slavism. With Poland 
resuscitated and Serbia strengthened, Vienna, it 
is certain, will be powerless to hold the Bohemians 
down. 

But no matter what may happen, whether Aus- 
tria-Hungary will remain Hapsburg, whether the 
Allies will impose their will on her destiny, or 
whether the Russians will become the masters of 
the North Slavs, let us hope that the future map- 
makers will not be military conquerors, as was the 
case at the Congress of Vienna in 1814, or states- 
men of the Bismarck type, who, at the Berlin Con- 
gress in 1878, were determined to separate the peo- 
ple of one race, instead of uniting them. Let the 
map-makers be ethnologists who will, wherever 
practicable, deliminate boundaries according to 
racial, not political lines, giving German territory 



PREFACE 13 

to the Germans, Magyar territory to the people of 
that race, Slavic lands to the Slavs. 

Bohemia would not assume the serious task of 
self-government as an inexperienced novice. Bo- 
hemia is one of the oldest states in Central Europe. 
As a kingdom she antedates the German kingdoms, 
not excepting Prussia, Saxony, Bavaria. Some of 
these were yet minor states when she already played 
a conspicuous role in the affairs of Europe. In 
point of population the United States of Bohemia — 
including Bohemia herself, Moravia, Silesia, and 
Slovakland — would have within her borders 3. 
population numbering about 12,000,000. The 
combined area of the three first-named states is 
almost twice the size of Switzerland. Prague, the 
capital, had in 19 10 581,163 inhabitants. As a 
wealth-providing and revenue-yielding country 
Bohemia stands unrivalled among the Hapsburg 
States. T. C. 

New York 



CONTENTS 

I. Have the Bohemians a Place in the 

Sun? 17 

Thomas Capek. 

II. The Slovaks of Hungary . . .113 
Thomas Capek, 

III. Why Bohemia Deserves Freedom . . 123 

Professor Bohumil Simek. 

IV. The Bohemian Character . . . 130 

Professor H. A. Miller. 

V. Place of Bohemia in the Creative 

Arts 153 

Professor Will S. Monroe. 

VI. The Bohemians and the Slavic Re- 
generation 160 

Professor Leo Wiener. 

Addenda. The Bohemians as Immigrants . 176 
Professor Emily G. Balch. 



HAVE THE BOHEMIANS A PLACE IN 

THE SUN? 

OHEMIA (German Bohmen, Bohemian 
Cechy *) has an area of 20,223 square 
miles, and is bounded on the north by 
Saxony and Prussian Silesia; on the east by Prus- 
sia and Moravia; on the south by Lower Austria; 
on the west by Bavaria. According to the census 
of 1 9 10, 4,241,918 inhabitants declared for Bo- 
hemian and 2,467,724 for the German language. 
Historians recognize two epochal events in the 
life of the nation. The first begins with the out- 
break of the Hussite wars, following the death of 
King Vaclav IV. in 1419; the second, with the 
battle of White Mountain in 1620. The period 

* The word Czech, which is being freely used in the Anglo-Amer- 
ican press, is a corrupt form of Cech. The German form is Czech, 
Tscheche, the French Tcheque. But, inasmuch as Cech is sounded 
more nearly like Checkh and not Czech, the form Czech fails utterly 
of its purpose and its use should be discontinued. The people them- 
selves prefer to be called Bohemians, not Czechs, which latter appella- 
tion is not generally known or understood. Some years ago a noted 
scholar was severely censured because he named his magazine, edited 
in the German language, but Bohemiophile in tendency, " Cechische 
Revue," instead of " Bohmische Revue." The truth of the matter is 
that the appellation Czech is an invention of Vienna journalists, who, 
by persistent use of the term, wish to give a warning to the world 
that Bohemia is not all Cech, but part German and part Cech. 

17 



18 BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

intervening between the first two events is re- 
ferred to as the Middle Age. That which pre- 
ceded the Hussite wars is called the Old Age, and, 
that which followed the defeat at White Moun- 
tain, the New Age. 

THE LAND AND THE PEOPLE 

The Margravate of Moravia, a sister state of 
Bohemia, and one of her crown-lands, contains an 
area of 8,583 square miles. The population of 
Moravia is 1,868,971 Bohemians and 719,435 
Germans. 

The third crown-land of Bohemia is the Duchy 
of Silesia, with an area of 1,987 square miles. 
The population is divided as follows : 180,348 
Bohemians, 325,523 Germans, 235,224 Poles.* 

Although statisticians found in Austria, in 
19 10, only 6,435,983 Bohemians, it is generally 
known that the actual figure is higher by several 
hundred thousands. Singularly enough, the test 
in Austria of one's nationality is not the mother 

* Silesia was much larger, but Frederick II. of Prussia despoiled 
Maria Theresa in 1742 of a major portion of it. Thus was created 
Prussian Silesia and Austrian Silesia. In Macaulay's " Life of Fred- 
erick the Great," we read why the Prussian King made war on his 
neighbor. In manifestoes he might, for form's sake, insert some 
idle stories about his antiquated claim on Silesia; but in his con- 
versations and Memoirs he took a very different tone. His own words 
were: " Ambition, interest, the desire of making people talk about 
me, carried the day; and I decided for war." If there is a rectifica- 
tion of Prussian boundary after the war, a portion of Prussian 
Silesia, that is still Bohemian, should be returned to Austrian 
Silesia. 



A PLACE IN THE SUN 19 

tongue of the citizen, as elsewhere, but the lingual 
medium which one employs in daily association 
with others. This medium the statisticians desig- 
nate the " Verkehrsprache " — the " Language of 
Association." The first decennial census, under 
this novel system, was taken in 1880, and the re- 
sults thereby obtained pleased Vienna so well that 
the method has remained in use ever since. When 
the matter was debated in parliament in 1880 the 
Bohemians and other Slavs indignantly protested 
against it as unscientific and as a device dictated 
by political motives. A census so taken, they con- 
tended, was calculated to raise by artful means the 
numerical strength of the Germans and to deduce 
from it the superior importance to the state of the 
Germanic element to the disadvantage of the non- 
Germans.* It was argued that the mother tongue 
of the citizens should serve as the test of one's 
nationality, not the language in which the Slavic 
workman may be compelled to address his German 
employer or a Slavic subaltern his German military 
superior. But, as usual, Slavic opposition was 
over-ridden. Even fair-minded Austrians con- 
demned the system as unscientific. Innama- 

* Representation in parliament being determinable by the result of 
the enumeration, one can at once see of what vital concern it is to 
non-Germans to obtain a census free from political bias. As matters 
are, the Germans constitute 35 per cent, of the population, yet have 
52 per cent, representation in the Reichsrath (parliament), while 24 
per cent. Bohemians are represented in parliament only by 17 per 
cent. 



20 BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

Sternegg, for instance, deplored the fact that the 
empire should have recourse to the " Verkehr- 
sprache " test for political purposes. On this 
ground Austrian official figures should be scruti- 
nized with extreme caution. It has repeatedly been 
proven by private census-takers that the official 
census is unreliable, and that it grossly under- 
estimates the numerical strength of the Bohemians. 

From an agricultural state, that it was until re- 
cently, Bohemia is rapidly changing into an indus- 
trial state. Two of the most valuable products, 
which make for the wealth of industrial countries, 
namely, coal and iron, the hills of Bohemia contain 
in abundance. Among her specialties, which have 
acquired world-wide renown, are decorated and 
engraved glassware, beer (Pilsener), high-class 
cotton textiles and linen goods, grass seeds, em- 
broidery, hops, fezzes worn by the Mohammedan 
people of the Orient, toys, etc. 

From times immemorial, Bohemia has been the 
battle-ground between the Slav and the Teuton. A 
glance at the map of Central Europe will tell the 
story. Most westerly of all the Slavic peoples, the 
Bohemians are surrounded on the north, west, and 
south by Germans. Only on the south and east 
frontiers are there strips of territory that connect 
them with kindred races. More than once the Ger- 
manic sea has threatened to engulf them in the 



A PLACE IN THE SUN 21 

same way that it swept away the Slavic tribes 
that lived north of them in Lusatia and of whose 
existence nothing now remains but the Slavic 
names of rivers and cities. The struggle for su- 
premacy in Bohemia may be said to have begun the 
year the fabled leader Cech, in the gray dawn of 
history (about 450 a.d.), migrated to the country, 
having dispossessed the non-Slavic tribes of Boii, 
from whom Bohemia acquired her name. The Hus- 
site wars in the fifteenth century are popularly be- 
lieved to have been waged to free men's intellects 
from the spiritual trammels of Rome; yet in the last 
analysis it will be found that the Hussites, in mak- 
ing war on the invaders who poured into the coun- 
try from Germany, rejoiced in vanquishing alike 
the foes of their race and the oppressors of their 
conscience. Such, at least, is the conviction that 
one acquires in perusing those chapters of the 
history of the country that treat of the Hussite 
wars. 

Jointly with Moravia, Bohemia formed the 
nucleus of the Bohemian State; this state had 
never ceased to be Bohemian-Slavic in character, 
though at times ruled by alien kings. The whole 
of Silesia and both Lusatias (Upper and Lower) 
also constituted part and parcel of this state, yet 
the latter were never so closely affiliated with 
Bohemia as Moravia had been, because the in- 



22 BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

habitants of the Lusatias were not by origin or 
preponderatingly Bohemian, but of PoHsh and 
Serb (Wend) ancestry, having been largely Ger- 
manized at the time they passed under the rule of 
the Bohemian Kings in the fourteenth century. 

Generally speaking, the Bohemians inhabited 
the flat lands of the interior, while the Germans 
overflowed the border line on the south, west, and 
north, forming an almost uninterrupted chain of 
settlements. As a matter of fact, however, there 
is no compact, unmixed German territory in Bo- 
hemia, which is exclusively German and into 
which the Bohemian workman, going in search of 
employment to the mines, mills, and shops in the 
northwest, has not penetrated, and in which he has 
not domiciled himself. The invasion of Bohemian 
workmen has virtually rendered bilingual every 
such Germanized district where industrialism 
flourishes. 

So intermixed are the two races on the border 
line that a person cannot say confidently that his 
ancestry is either pure German or pure Bohemian. 
Observe, for example, the names of Bohemian lead- 
ers: Rieger, Brauner, Gregr, Zeithammer. They 
have an unmistakable Teutonic ring. Again, note 
the names of Schmeykal, Tascheck, Chlumecky, 
and Giskra, who lead the German cohorts. These 
clearly betray Slavic origin. It has been remarked 



A PLACE IN THE SUN 23 

sarcastically that the Bohemians were really Ger- 
man-speaking Slavs. Certain it is that their asso- 
ciation of more than a thousand years' duration 
with Teutonic neighbors resulted in their accept- 
ing many of the latter's customs and western cul- 
ture. Then, too, foreigners have noticed in 
Bohemians a degree of aggressiveness that they 
claim is singularly lacking in the make-up of the 
other Slavs. This trait, aggressiveness, may have 
been inherited as a result of an almost ceaseless 
struggle for national existence. It is not improb- 
able, however, that the racial mixture above men- 
tioned may have been one of the contributing 
causes. 

Fear of the Teutonic peril has always har- 
ried the soul of the nation. Every historian, every 
poet, every patriot has admonished the people 
to be on their guard. One of the oldest chorals 
extant contains the pathetic invocation to the 
patron saint of the country. " St. Vaclav, Duke of 
the Bohemian Land, do not let us perish nor our 
descendants." 

In course of time many Germans and denational- 
ized Bohemians were Bohemianized, so that it is 
hazardous to guess whether in Bohemia and 
Moravia more Germans adopted the Bohemian 
language than Bohemians the German. The final 
sum of this process of assimilation seems to be 



24 BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

that the Bohemians constitute more than two-thirds 
and the Germans less than one-third of the entire 
population of the kingdom. 

As regards the ownership of land, Bohemians 
hold about three-fifths of the soil, in Moravia three- 
fourths. If it is true that the people with a future 
is the one that owns the land, then the future of 
Bohemians is clearly assured. Looking backward, 
it was very fortunate for the nation that in the 
days of its deepest abasement the peasant was not 
allowed to dispose of his holdings at will, other- 
wise the inrush of the Teutons would have still 
more reduced the national area. 

If we accept literacy as one of the tests of the 
culture of a people, it will be found that the Bo- 
hemians rank highest among the Slavic races, sur- 
passing even Austrian-Germans and Hungarian 
Magyars. According to the official reports of the 
Commissioner of Immigration in Washington, the 
number of illiterates among Bohemians is less 
than 3 per cent., Slovaks 25 per cent., Serbo- 
Croatians, 38 per cent,, Poles 40 per cent.. Little 
Russians (Ruthenes), 63 per cent. Among the 
non-Slavic immigrants from Austria-Hungary to 
America the percentages of illiteracy are as fol- 
lows: Germans 4 per cent., Magyars 12 per cent., 
Italians 23 per cent., Jews 23 per cent., Rumuns 
29 per cent. 



A PLACE IN THE SUN 25 

It may not be uninteresting to note, as indicative 
of the position held by Bohemians among the Slavs, 
the number of newspapers circulated in Slavdom.* 
The Lusatian Serbs, a remnant of a once populous 
Slavic branch in Germany, support ii publica- 
tions; Slovaks, 53 (4 of v^hich are dailies); 
Slovenes, no (5 dailies); Bulgars, 300 (19 
dailies) ; Serbo-Croatians, 350 (37 dailies) ; Poles, 
600 (78 dailies); Bohemians, 1,400 (34 dailies), 
and Russians, 1,800 (315 dailies). From this 
statistical fragment it will be seen that a little 
country like Bohemia takes very favorable rank 
when compared with the great Russian Empire. 

At home the Bohemian is looked upon as a pro- 
gressive agriculturist, and American tourists who 
have traveled in the country have been favorably 
impressed with the orderliness of the farms and 
the high state of cultivation of the land. In the 
great agricultural belt formed by the States of 
Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, 
and the Dakotas there are large settlements of 
Bohemians (about one-half of the Bohemian popu- 
lation in the United States devoting itself to farm- 
ing) , and their farms are known to bear favorable 
comparison with the homesteads owned by land- 
tillers of Scandinavian and Teuton ancestry. 

The fact that a particular faith was denied him 

* " The Slavdom : Picture of Its Past and Present," Prague, 1912. 



S6 BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

and he was required to accept a different creed, 
has made the Bohemian one of the most liberal- 
minded of men, — in many instances a sceptic and 
a scoffer. Possibly there is no other foreign na- 
tionality in the United States that can boast trans- 
lations in the vernacular of Thomas Paine and of 
other advanced thinkers as early as the Bo- 
hemians. 

Economically the Germans are stronger than any 
other one race in the empire. Much of their un- 
questioned primacy in the realm of commerce and 
industry is due to the fact that everywhere they 
enjoy special favors from the government. Then, 
too, the Slav, who is by preference a land-tiller 
(as is also the Magyar), is still a novice in busi- 
ness. The vast economic interests of the Jews are 
found wholly on the side of the Germans. Ernest 
Denis believes that German primacy in commerce 
may yet continue for some time to come, because 
the districts inhabited by them in Bohemia offer 
greater inducements to the investor and the capi- 
talist, owing to the wealth of mineral riches found 
along the northwest frontier. It is, however, Denis' 
opinion that the existing inequality in the distribu- 
tion of industrial wealth will diminish as years 
go by ; democracy, marching as it does everywhere 
at the expense of the upper classes, will level it 



A PLACE IN THE SUN 27 

down and give the Bohemian majority its share in 
commerce and industry. 

THE DOWNFALL 

The Bohemians preserved their independence 
till 1620. That year they rebelled against the king 
for political and religious reasons and were de- 
feated at the battle of White Hill (Bila Hora) near 
Prague. From the effects of this disastrous event 
the nation has never recovered, for even now, after 
the lapse of 295 years, the scars received at Bila 
Hora are not wholly healed. 

Ferdinand H. punished the rebels with tradi- 
tional Austrian fury. On June 21, 1621, he 
caused the execution at Prague of twenty-seven 
leaders of the revolution — ^all men belonging to the 
most noted families in the country. A number of 
them were condemned to humiliating physical pun- 
ishment and the estates of all were confiscated. 
The first to lay his head on the block of the exe- 
cutioner was Count Joachim Andrew §lik 
(Schlick). During the interregnum Slik had been 
a Director; besides, he had served as Chief Justice 
and Governor of Upper Lusatia. The next victim 
was Vaclav Budovec of Budova, " a man of splen- 
did talents and illustrious learning, distinguished 
as a writer, widely known as a traveler, and an 
ornament to his country." Pelcl said of Budova 



S8 BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

that he belonged " to that old cast of serious, 
thoughtful, inflexible Bohemians, by which the na- 
tion was characterized in the fifteenth and six- 
teenth centuries." The third to suffer was Chris- 
topher Harant of Polzic, " a learned man, dis- 
tinguished writer, and noted traveler." The next 
on the death list was Caspar Kaplif of Sulevic, a 
venerable man of eighty-six. The fifth was 
Prokop Dvofecky of Olbramovic, a scion of an old 
family. The sixth was Baron Frederick Bily, 
" an upright and learned man, one of the Directors 
at the time of the interregnum." The seventh, 
Henry Otto of Los, who, under Frederick, was 
connected with the exchequer. Then followed suc- 
cessively Dionys Cernin, William Konechlumsky, 
aged seventy years, Bohuslav of Michalovic, "a 
man of splendid talents who deserved well of his 
country," Valentine Kochan of Prachov, a learned 
master of arts; Tobias Stefek of Kolodej, a citizen 
of Prague and a Director of the Revolution ; John 
Jesensky of Jesen (Jessenius), a scholar, scientist, 
and orator, " whose writings shed lustre on the 
university;" Christopher Kober, a noted citizen of 
Prague; Burgomasters John Sultys of Kutna Hora 
and Maximilian Hosfalek of 2atec (Saaz), (the 
two latter having been Directors during the in- 
terregnum), John Kutnaur, a Councilor of Prague, 
Kutnaur's father-in-law Simon Susicky, Nathaniel 



A PLACE IN THE SUN m 

Vodnansky of Uracov, Vaclav Jizbicky. The last 
to undergo death were Henry Kozel, Andrew 
Kocour of Otin, George ;&ecicky, Michael Witt- 
man, Simon Vokac of Chys and Spicberk, Leander 
Riippel, and George Hauenschild. On the tower 
of the ancient Charles Bridge, which connects the 
Old Town with the Small Town in Prague, twelve 
heads of the rebels were set up in small wire cages, 
six on each side of the tower, to awe the populace. 
There these gruesome evidences of Hapsburg 
hatred remained for years. On the same tower 
were exposed to public view the hands of Slik and 
Michalovic and the tongue of Jesensky, Riippel's 
head and hand were nailed on the wall of the 
Town House. 

So ended the " Bloody Day at Prague " — a day 
that Bohemians may have I'^orgiven, but which 
none have forgotten. What nov/ followed is prob- 
ably without parallel in the history of European 
nations. Edmund de Schweinitz, in commenting 
on the consequences of the Bohemian Revolution, 
says that " in the history of Christendom there 
were few events more mournful. From the pin- 
nacle of prosperity Bohemia and Moravia were 
plunged into the depths of adversity." 

The month the executions took place, the em- 
peror, or rather the so-called Liechtenstein's Com- 
mission on Confiscations which had been appointed 



so BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

by the emperor, pronounced forfeiture on the 
estates of 658 landowners of the nobility out of 
a total of 728, whose names were on the list of 
accused. Thomas Bilek, a writer of unimpeach- 
able authority, has published a voluminous book 
on these confiscations from which it would appear 
that the Liechtenstein Commission had confiscated 
fully two-thirds of all the lands in Bohemia. Some 
of the choicest estates taken away from the rebels 
the emperor retained for the Hapsburg family. 
A goodly portion of the forfeited lands was given 
to the church, of which the emperor was a devout 
member. " Take, fathers, take," he used to say to 
the ecclesiastics when endowing this or that 
foundation with gifts of confiscated estates. " It 
is not always that you will have a Ferdinand." 
Still other lands reverted to the state. What was 
left the emperor magnanimously distributed among 
those of his favorites whose military prowess in 
the rebellion entitled them to some special recog- 
nition or compensation. Albrecht, Count of Wal- 
lenstein or Waldstein, at one time a Generalissimo 
of Ferdinand's army against Gustavus Adolphus, 
was able to " purchase " sixty confiscated estates 
of an enormous value. 

Struve has remarked that of all the nobles in 
the world those in the Hapsburg Monarchy had 



A PLACE IN THE SUN 81 

probably the least reason to boast of their ancestry. 
This is especially true of the nobility whose ad- 
vent into Bohemia antedates the first half of the 
seventeenth century. From the events here re- 
lated began the rise in Bohemia of such families 
as Buquoy, Clary de Riva, Aldringen, Trautmans- 
dorfif, Metternich, Marradas, Verduga, Colloredo, 
Piccolomini, Wallis, Gallas, Millesimo, Liechten- 
stein, Goltz, Villani, Defours, Huerta, Vasques — 
names indicating Spanish, Italian, German, and 
Walloon birth. These aliens, enriched by property 
taken away from Bohemian nobility, surrounded 
themselves with foreign officials, who treated the 
natives with the scorn and insolence of victors. 
Their chateaux formed in many cases the nucleus 
of German settlements which later threatened to 
overwhelm the nation. Some of these " islands," 
or settlements, which were situated farther inland, 
were in time absorbed by the native population. 
But not so with the colonies on the border. These 
latter not only preserved the lingual and national 
characteristics of the owners, but they even con- 
trived to Germanize the home element that came 
into contact with them. It was during this calami- 
tous period that the Germans made the greatest in- 
roads upon Bohemian national territory. 

Prior to the Thirty Years' War Bohemia was 



32 BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

overwhelrtiingly Protestant,* but Ferdinand deter- 
mined that in his empire there should be " unity 
of faith and tongue." A unity of faith he and 
his successors have achieved, but it has been de- 
nied to the Hapsburgs — ^much as they have tried to 
achieve it — the unity of language. 

In 1620 Jesuit fathers were invited to come to 
Bohemia and to take charge of the once renowned 
University of Prague and of the provincial schools. 
" The Jesuits buried the spirit of the Bohemian 
nation for centuries." This is the severe judg- 
ment of no less a person than V. V. Tomek, the 
noted historian. Accompanied by Liechtenstein's 
dragoons these ecclesiastics went from town to 
town, searched libraries, carried off books written 
in Bohemian and burned them whether they were 
" tainted " or not. Sometimes the books were pri- 
vately thrown in the flames in the houses where they 
had been seized ; at other times they were brought 
to the market-place or to the public gallows and 
there publicly burned. The Jesuits were indefati- 
gable in their search for heretical literature, ran- 
sacking houses from cellar to garret, opening every 
closet and chest, prying into the very dog kennels 
and pig-sties. People hid their most precious 

* Now of every 1,000 inhabitants in Bohemia 956.61 profess tha 
Catholic faith. Due to various reasons — spiritual, political, and histor- 
ical — more than one-half of the American Bohemians have seceded 
from the Catholic Church. Some have joined various Protestant 
sects, but the majority of the secessionists are Free-tbinkers. 



A PLACE IN THE SUN 33 

books from the ferreting eyes of the inquisition- 
ers in baking ovens, cellars, and caves. There are 
cases on record of rare Bohemian volumes having 
been saved from destruction by being hidden under 
manure piles. 

One zealot, Konias by name, boasted that he 
had burned or otherwise mutilated 60,000 Bo- 
hemian volumes. According to him " all 
Bohemian books printed between the years 1414 
and 1620, treating of religious subjects, were gen- 
erally dangerous and suspicious." From their seat 
in the Clementinum (Prague University) they pre- 
sided over the intellectual life of the country; 
that is to say, they wholly suppressed it. In order 
to more systematically supervise the work, a censor 
was appointed by them for each of the three 
lands, — Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia, — and it 
was the duty of this censor to see to it that no 
books were published or reprinted that did not 
meet the approval of the general of the order. 
Easy was the labor of the censor, for in Moravia, 
for instance, only one printer was fortunate enough 
to secure a license. In Bohemia they set up the so- 
called University Printing Office. Besides this 
only five or six other establishments were licensed 
to print books. In a few decades these zealots 
destroyed Bohemian literature altogether. The 
almanacs, tracts, hymnals, and prayer books that 



34j BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

issued from their printing presses could not be 
dignified by the term literature. Count Liitzow, 
in his " History of Bohemian Literature," frankly 
admits that, with few exceptions, all the men who, 
during the last years of Bohemian independence, 
were most prominent in literature and politics 
belonged to the Bohemian Church. Living in 
exile in foreign countries, there was no one left 
at home to resume their tasks. 

Ferdinand began his anti-reformation crusade 
in earnest in 162 1. In December of that year he 
issued a patent by virtue of which about one thou- 
sand teachers and ministers of the gospel of the Bo- 
hemian Church were forced to leave the country. 
The Lutherans did not come under this ban, inas- 
much as the emperor was anxious to please his 
ally, the Elector of Saxony, who pleaded clem- 
ency for his co-religionists. In 1624 seven patents 
were promulgated. Some of these were directed 
against the laity, which, till then, had escaped the 
wrath of the conqueror. It ordered the expulsion 
from trade guilds of all those who could not agree 
with the emperor in matters of faith. Discrimina- 
tory measures against nonconformist merchants 
and traders went into effect, which quickly resulted 
in their ruin. Another patent, bearing date July 
31, 1627, was more severe than those preceding it. 
By it dissenters of both sexes and irrespective of 



A PLACE IN THE SUN 35 

rank were ordered to renounce their faith within 
six months, or failing to do so, leave the country. 
The operation of this patent extended to Moravia, 
but not to Silesia and Lusatia. The two latter- 
named provinces had been spared because of a 
promise given by the emperor to the Elector of 
Saxony. 

So severely did the country suffer by forced ex- 
patriation, as a result of these edicts, that Ferdi- 
nand saw himself compelled to issue other patents 
to check it. In the hope of conciliating he remitted 
fines in certain cases, discontinued suits for trea- 
son, and made restitution of confiscated property. 
In some cases he extended the time within which 
heretics could become reconciled with the church, 
but the clemency was extended too late, for while 
some individuals yielded to the formidable pres- 
sure, the great mass of nonconformists, com- 
prising the very flower of the nation, were deter- 
mined rather to lose their property and leave the 
fatherland than to renounce that which they held 
most sacred. 

Count Slavata, who himself took no inconsider- 
able part in this terrible drama of anti-reformation, 
and who, owing to his religious convictions, cannot 
be accused of partiality, is authority for the state- 
ment that about 36,000 families, including 185 
houses of nobility (some of these houses num- 



S6 BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

bered as many as 50 persons each), statesmen, 
distinguished authors, professors, preachers, — 
spurning to accept the emperor's terms, went into 
exile. 

In 1627 Ferdinand promulgated what he desig- 
nated the " Amended Statute." The " amend- 
ment " really consisted in the abolishment of those 
ancient rights and liberties of the land which were 
incompatible with autocratic powers. 

Under the " Amended Statute " the kingdom, 
heretofore free to elect its sovereign, was declared 
to be an hereditary possession, both in the male and 
female line, of the Hapsburg family. The three 
estates — lords, knights, and the cities— which till 
then constituted the legislative branch of the gov- 
ernment, were augmented by a fourth unit, the 
clergy. The fourth estate was destined to exercise, 
as subsequent events have shown, the greatest in- 
fluence on the affairs of the government. The Diet 
at Prague was divested practically of all its power 
and initiative; from now on its sole function was 
to levy and collect taxes. And because the king 
had invited to the country so many alien nobles 
(or commoners later ennobled) who were ignorant 
of the language of the land, the amended statute 
provided that henceforth the German language 
should enjoy equal rights with the Bohemian. A 
, disastrous blow to the unity of the Bohemian 



A PLACE IN THE SUN 37 

Crown was further dealt by the annulment of the 
right of the estates in Bohemia, Moravia, and 
Silesia to meet at a General Assembly for the 
purpose of deliberating on matters common to 
the crown. By this clever stroke the emperor tore 
asunder the ancient ties of the kingdom. He 
rightly reasoned that by isolating each of the in- 
tegral parts of the kingdom he could easier hope 
to hold in leash the whole of it. 

In time the administration of the Bohemian 
Crown was entrusted to an executive who received 
the title of Chancellor, and when the kings no 
longer resided in Prague, having taken up a 
permanent abode in Vienna, the Chancellory was 
removed thither, ostensibly on the ground that 
the Chancellor was required to be near the person 
of the sovereign. In reality, however, the trans- 
fer was a part of a preconceived plan to make 
Vienna the centre of the empire, from which the 
Hapsburg " provinces " were to be ruled. Under 
one pretext or another the Chancellory was being 
gradually shorn of its powers, until Maria Theresa 
(1740-1780) abolished it altogether. Henceforth 
even purely local matters were administered from 
Vienna direct, and the officials began to style 
the once proud kingdom a " province of Aus- 
tria." 

During the Thirty Years' War thousands of vil- 



38 BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

lages were destroyed by fire and many of them 
have never been rebuilt. The population, which 
before the war was estimated at 3,000,000, was 
reduced by fire, sword, and pestilence to about 
800,000. Fields lay fallow for years for lack of 
workers to cultivate them. Of the 151,000 farms 
before the war hardly 50,000 remained. Native 
nobility was reduced to beggary by the confisca- 
tion of their estates, and the peasantry that sur- 
vived was reduced by alien lords to a degrading 
condition of serfdom. Between 162 1 and 1630 400 
Prague citizens went into exile. The Nove Mesto 
(one of the Prague quarters) alone had at one 
time 500 vacant houses. The town of 2atec, which 
in 161 8 had 460 citizens, counted ten years later 
205 of them. In Kutna Hora, of a total of 
600 houses, 200 remained without owners or 
tenants. The population of the city of Olomouc in 
Moravia, by 1640, was reduced from 30,000 to 
1,670. Wherever the armies marched nothing 
was seen but waste and ruins. According to notes 
taken by Swedish soldiers, 138 cities and 2,171 
villages were totally ravaged by fire. The textile 
industry, which had been the source of the wealth 
of the country, was almost wholly destroyed by 
the war. 

The defeat at White Mountain could not have 
been productive of such disastrous consequences 



A PLACE IN THE SUN S9 

had it not been for the fact that the nobles were 
the standard-bearers of Bohemian nationalism and 
the sole representatives of the nation's culture and 
traditions. The peasantry in those days and for 
a long time afterward was yet helplessly dependent 
on the aristocracy. 

Bohemian Huguenots were scattered over every 
land in Central Europe, most of them seeking 
refuge in nearby Saxony, Silesia, Hungary, and 
Poland, Many emigrated to more distant lands, 
such as Sweden, serving in the army of Gustavus 
Adolphus, Russia, Holland, England. A few of 
the more adventurous spirits wandered off with 
the English and the Dutch to America. One of 
them, Augustine Herman, a noted figure among 
the early Dutch in New Amsterdam, made an 
attempt to establish a colony of compatriots on a 
grant of land that he had received from Lord 
Baltimore and which he named in honor of his 
native land, Bohemia Manor, a place famous in 
early Maryland history. Numerous exiles settled 
in the first half of the seventeenth century in Vir- 
ginia. In the beginning the exiles hoped to be 
permitted to return home, but the terms of the 
Peace of Westphalia (1648) made such a return 
definitely impossible. They repeatedly called for 
help. Oliver Cromwell, it is said, had a project 
under consideration whereby Bohemian exiles were 



40 BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

to be settled in Ireland. John Amos Comenius, the 
bishop of the Bohemian Church, a distinguished 
educator, himself an exile living in Holland, pre- 
sented the history of his church to King Charles 
II. of England in 1660, with a stirring account of 
its suffering. 

Suspecting that the dissenters were yet unsup- 
pressed, the government caused other patents to be 
issued, one of which, published in 1650, imposed 
severe penalties such as the billeting of troops, 
banishment from the country, confiscation of prop- 
erty and, in extreme cases, death, A patent dated 
April 9th of that year required that within six 
weeks all parishes should instal conformist clergy 
or close. Under Josef I. (1705-1711), and again 
under Charles VI. (1711-1740), the work of anti- 
reformation was renewed with increased severity. 
Loyal subjects were enjoined under pain of death 
from harboring or aiding heretic teachers or min- 
isters, the reading and smuggling into the country 
or otherwise circulating Bohemian books on the 
prohibited list. Other patents followed in 1721, 
1722, 1723, 1724, 1725, 1726, with the result that 
non-Catholics who still secretly clung to the for- 
bidden faith emigrated to Saxony and Prussia, 
where they sought the protection of the rulers of 
those countries. The suffering of the unfortunates 



A PLACE IN THE SUN 41 

was somewhat, though not wholly, relieved when 
the German princes, assembled in the Diet at 
Regensburg in 1735, sent a strong appeal to the 
Austrian Emperor to treat his subjects with more 
toleration. When the Edict of Toleration was 
issued in 1781, permitting free worship, there still 
remained in Bohemia about 100,000 Protestants.* 
Of the refugees who fled to Germany in the first 
quarter of the eighteenth century many found their 
way with the Herrnhuters, or Moravians, as they 
are called in the United States, to Georgia, and 
others to Pennsylvania, where they established, in 
1741, the flourishing town of Bethlehem, now the 
recognized centre of the Moravian Church in the 
United States.f 

* However, the Patent of Tolerance extended only to Protestants of 
the Helvetian and Augsburg Confessions, not to the Bohemian Church, 
which latter had been denied recognition. 

t On February 9, 1748, a bill was introduced in the English Parlia- 
ment " to relieve the United Brethren (so-called in Comenius' time), 
or Moravians, from military duties and taking oaths." Among the 
speakers was General Oglethorpe, who spoke in support of the bill. 
" In the year 1683 a most pathetic account of these brethren was 
published by order of Archbishop Bancroft and Bishop Compton," said 
Oglethorpe. " They also addressed the Church of England in the 
year 1715, being reduced to a very low ebb in Poland, and his late 
Majesty, George I., by the recommendation of the late Archbishop 
Wake, gave orders in council for the relief of these Reformed Episco- 
pal Churches, and letters patent for their support were issued soon 
after. But since 1724 circumstances have altered for the better, and 
they have wonderfully revived, increased and spread in several coun- 
tries. They have even made some settlements in America. In the 
province of Pennsylvania they have about 800 people to whom the 
proprietor and Governor gave very good character." 



42 BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

GERMANIZATION AND THE AWAKENING 

Germanization, as a matter of fact, was pur- 
sued in Bohemia by every Hapsburg, though the 
rulers of that house have not planned it as sys- 
tematically as Maria Theresa or her son, Josef II. 
Centralism, to be successful and powerful, re- 
quired the levelling of the differences of speech 
and of race. Every Hapsburg ruler had been edu- 
cated to the belief that he was rendering a supreme 
service to his subjects by forcing them " to unlearn 
the barbaric language of their sires, which iso- 
lated them from the rest of the world." " He who 
knows only Bohemian and Latin," declared Coun- 
cilor Gebler, in 1765, " is bound to make a poor 
scholar, and it were better for him to stick to 
the plow and to the trade; there are too many 
Latin scholars as it is." More and more the 
conviction gained ground that a language like 
the Bohemian, spoken but by a few millions of 
people, was valueless, and that it would be a folly 
for the government to aid in its restoration. 

Austrian statesmen were determined to impose 
German at one time even on the unsuspecting 
Galicians, though in Galicia there were no Ger- 
mans at all, only Poles and Russians. Discoursing 
upon the worth or the lack of value of languages 
of small nations, Denis says : " These arguments 



A PLACE IN THE SUN 43 

may be true, but unfortunately they could be ap- 
plied to every language in the world." 

In 1774 a detailed plan for the Germanization 
of schools in the empire was submitted to Maria 
Theresa. This plan provided for German schools 
and none others. By " mother " language was 
meant the German. Bohemian was permitted in 
the primary or lowest grades of the school. No 
pupil could enter a gymnasium (secondary school) 
who had not had a previous training in German. 
Fortunately for the non-Germans of that period, 
progress was less rapid than had been generally 
expected. Schoolmasters were scarce and pupils, 
not understanding the language of the teachers, 
advanced but slowly. As a result of all this, the 
queen, though unwilling, was compelled to make 
concessions here and there and to proceed less ag- 
gressively. 

A noted writer has truthfully said that in the 
eighteenth century Bohemians were outcasts in 
their own country. A lad who wanted to learn a 
trade had to attend a German school for appren- 
tices, and only pupils knowing German were en- 
titled to receive stipends. In the secondary schools 
in Bohemia the vernacular was treated as a " for- 
eign " language. A professor was required to 
qualify in Latin and Greek, yet no one questioned 
whether or not he knew the tongue of the na- 



44f BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

tives. Pupils were educated in German to be able 
to perform the work of janissaries on the people 
of their own race. Slowly but steadily Bohemian 
was likewise forced out of the courts. Laws were 
promulgated in the German language. The Bo- 
hemian began to lose ground in the highest courts 
of justice; gradually it was forced out from the 
inferior courts. After 1749 law documents in Bo- 
hemian became rarer. When, in 1788, Count 
Cavriani moved that only certain notices be pub- 
lished in that language, the motion was passed 
without opposition. From that time on German 
took its place as the official language in the king- 
dom. 

Can we wonder then that, pressed as it was on 
four sides — by the church, the state, the school, 
and the dominant classes of the population — ^the 
tongue of Hus and Comenius lost ground almost 
altogether? And who saved it from utter extinc- 
tion ? It was the lowly peasant who continued giv- 
ing it shelter under his thatched roof, long after it 
had been expelled from the proud chateaux of the 
nobility and disowned by the middle classes. The 
peasant preserved the language for the literary 
men who rescued from oblivion this precious gift 
for future generations. " It is admitted by all," 
said Palacky, " that the resuscitation of the na- 
tion was accomplished wholly by our writers. 



A PLACE IN THE SUN 45 

These men saved the language; they carried the 
banner which they wished the nation to follow. 
Literature was the fountain spring of our national 
life, and the literati placed themselves at the fore- 
front of the revivalist movement." 

The diet of the kingdom recommended, in 1790, 
that Bohemian should be introduced at least in cer- 
tain secondary schools, preferably in Prague, but 
the Austrian world of officialdom was opposed 
even to this concession. " No one threatens the 
life of the Bohemian tongue," protested these offi- 
cials. " The government cannot antagonize the 
feeling of the most influential and wealthiest 
classes who use German, if not exclusively, at 
least overwhelmingly. Moreover, to encourage 
Bohemian would be to lose sight of the idea of 
the unification of the empire. The state must not 
deprive the Bohemians of the blessing and of the 
opportunity that emanate from the knowledge of 
German. Useful though Bohemian may be, its 
study must not be at the expense of German." 

Two important events, both of which occurred 
toward the end of the eighteenth century, helped 
to awaken the soul of the prostrate nation. One 
was the determination of Emperor Josef IL to 
make the empire a German state, as has already 
been pointed out. But a greater incentive than 
Josef's coercive measures were the inspiring ideals 



46 BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

of the first French Revolution which found their 
way even to far-off Bohemia. The motto of the 
French revolutionists, " Liberty, equality, frater- 
nity," could not fail to give hope to the handful of 
Bohemian intellectuals.* 

However, as late as 1848, the year of revolu- 
tionary changes in Austria, the Bohemian lan- 
guage was still a Cinderella in its own land. In 
the streets of Prague it was rarely spoken by the 
people of any social distinction. To engage in 
Bohemian conversation with strangers was a risky 
undertaking, unless one was prepared to be rebuked 
in the sternest manner. German predominated, 
except in stores that were patronized by appren- 
tices and peddlers. Posters solely in Bohemian 
were not allowed by the police. The text had 
to be translated, and the German part of it printed 
above the Bohemian. Nowhere but in the house- 
holds of the commonest classes was the despised 

* When Napoleon sought to weaken Austria's position at home, he 
addressed a patriotic appeal to the Bohemians. " Your union with 
Austria," read Napoleon's appeal, " has been your misfortune. Your 
blood has been shed for her in distant lands, and your dearest in- 
terests have been sacrificed continually to those of the hereditary 
provinces. You form the finest portion of her empire, and you are 
treated as a mere province to be used as an instrument of passions 
to which you are strangers. You have national customs and a na- 
tional language; you pride yourself on your ancient and illustrious 
origin. Assume once more your position as a nation. Choose a king 
for yourselves, who shall reign for you alone, who shall dwell in your 
midst and be surrounded by your citizens and your soldiers." — Na- 
poleon's proclamation found no echo among the people for whom it 
was intended. The sentiment of nationality was yet too weak to 
respond. 



A PLACE IN THE SUN 47 

tongue sheltered. Families belonging to the world 
of officialdom and to the wealthier bourgeoisie, 
though often imperfectly familiar with it, clung to 
German. Strict etiquette barred Bohemian from 
the salons. The only entrance that was open to it 
led through the halls of the servants. So com- 
pletely were the people denationalized that for- 
eigners visiting the resorts at Carlsbad and Marien- 
bad expressed their astonishment on hearing the 
peasants talk in an unknown tongue. They had 
learned to look upon Bohemia as a part of Ger- 
many and on the inhabitants as Germans. Par- 
ticularly the Russians and the Poles were sur- 
prised to meet kinsmen in Bohemia whose language 
sounded familiar to their ears. 

" A few of us," writes Jacob Maly, one of the 
staunch patriots of that time, " met each Thurs- 
day at the Black Horse (a first-class hotel in 
Prague) and gave orders to the waiters in Bohe- 
mian, who, of course, understood us well. This we 
did with the intention of giving encouragement to 
others; but seeing the futility of our efforts in this 
direction, we gave up the propaganda in disgust." 

In 1852, the then chief of police of Prague con- 
fidently predicted that in fifty years there would be 
no Bohemians in Prague. That even Austrian 
Chiefs of Police could make a mistake, appears 
from the fact that Greater Prague to-day numbers 



48 BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

nearly 600,000 inhabitants, of whom only about 
17,000 are Germans. When, in 1844, Archduke 
Stephen came to Prague and the citizens arranged 
a torch procession in his honor, the police were 
scandalized to hear, mingling with the customary 
" Vivat," shouts in Bohemian, "Slava! " 

Authors and newspaper writers were objects 
of unbounded curiosity. Maly, already quoted, 
relates the following : " Walking in the streets of 
Prague, I often noticed people pointing at me and 
saying : ' Das ist auch einer von den Vlastenzen ' 
(Here goes another of those patriots), or * Das ist 
ein gewaltiger Czeche ' (There is a thorough Cech 
for you). During my stay in southern Bohemia 
in 1838, the innkeeper of a tavern which I fre- 
quented evenings had surely no reason to regret 
my patronage, for people would come primarily 
to have a peep at me." 

In the biography of Palacky * we read an account 

* Francis Palacky (1798-1876), historian, revivalist, and statesman, 
is, by common consent, regarded as the greatest Bohemian o£ our 
time. His monumental work, " History of the Bohemian Nation," 
on which he labored some thirty years, will endure as long as the 
Bohemian language continues to be spoken. There was a time when 
not only the outside world, but Bohemians themselves, believed that 
the old-time Bohemians of the stormy days of John Hus or those 
who revolted against Ferdinand II. were a band of heretics and 
rebels. Such has been the official Austrian version of these events 
in Bohemia. However, the truth could not be suppressed for all time. 
Palacky and others were being born, and in time the alluvium of 
Austrian bigotry and of falsehood was removed from the nation's 
past, and to the astonished gaze of Resurrected Bohemia was re- 
vealed a glorious history of which descendants could be justly proud. 
Great men, national heroes, hitherto unknown or misunderstood, 
emerged from almost every chapter of Palacky's work. 



A PLACE IN THE SUN 49 

of a memorable meeting of patriots held in 1825 
in the Sternberg Palace in Prague. Palacky being 
invited to dinner on that particular day, as he often 
had been, remained in the company of the Counts 
Sternberg until midnight. A violent dispute that 
arose between the guests and the hosts would not 
allow of their separation. Among other ques- 
tions discussed was the prospective publication of 
a scientific magazine in both languages, Bohemian 
and German. Abbe Dobrovsky, the " father of 
Slavic philology," and Count Kaspar were of the 
opinion that it was too late to think seriously 
of the resuscitation of the Bohemian nation, and 
that all attempts in that direction must end in 
failure. Palacky, then a youthful enthusiast, dis- 
agreed in this with his elder companions and bit- 
terly reproached Dobrovsky, that he, a literary 
light among his people, had not written a single 
book in the mother tongue. " Were we all to do 
the same, then indeed our nation would perish for 
lack of intellectual nourishment. As for me," fer- 
vently argued Palacky, " were I but a gypsy by 
birth, and the last of that race, I would still deem 
it my duty to try to perpetuate an honorable men- 
tion of it in the annals of mankind." Count 
Sternberg, though he knew the language well, never, 
iised it in conversation with people of education. 



50 BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

He availed himself of it only when talking with 
his servants. 

In 1811 Dobrovsky wrote to the noted Slovene 
scholar, Kopitar, that " the cause of the nation is 
desperate, unless God helps." In his discourse, 
" Geschichte der Deutschen und ihrer Sprache in 
Bohmen," dated 1790, Pelcl expressed himself as 
follows : " The time is approaching when the Bo- 
hemian language will be in the same situation at 
home as the Slavonic language is to-day in Miess, 
Brandenburg, and Silesia, where German is every- 
where prevalent and where nothing remains of the 
Slavic but the names of cities, villages, and rivers." 

It stands to reason that the language, returning 
to its own after a disuse of almost two hundred 
years and dug from the grave of oblivion, needed 
much burnishing, purifying, and modernizing. 
Terminology of arts and sciences, that flourished 
while the language lay dormant, had to be created. 
Dictionaries, grammars, and histories had to be 
compiled. Above all, the dross of alien forms had 
to be removed and, while the old Bohemian of 
Hus, Comenius, and Blahoslav constituted an inex- 
haustible store of material, it was necessary to 
borrow from kindred Slavic tongues and to coin 
many modern terms. 

That the older writers composed some of their 
works in German seems paradoxical (German in 



A PLACE IN THE SUN 51 

these instances was used to defeat German), yet it 
was natural, considering the low state of Bohemian 
culture and the corresponding literary excellence 
in neighboring Germany. Thus, John Kollar, the 
apostle of literary Pan-Slavism, wrote his main 
work in German. Josef Dobrovsky, already men- 
tioned, composed all his works in German. Josef 
Safafik's monumental volume on " Slavic An- 
tiquities " was also written in German ; even the 
" Father of his country," Francis Palacky, wrote 
his " History of the Bohemian Nation "* in the 
tongue of Schiller and Goethe. When, in 183 1, a 
number of writers gathered in a well-known coffee- 
house in Prague, Celakovsky, one of them, re- 
marked, half jokingly and half seriously, that 
Bohemian letters would perish should the ceiling 
of the room where they were chatting fall and kill 
those present. 

The literary men and the " vlastenci " (patriots) 
were looked upon by many people with good- 
natured tolerance. Enemies of the cause regarded 
them with ill-concealed suspicion, not infrequently 
with contempt, while the government, distrusting 
everything that was new, suspected them of dan- 
gerous intrigues against the safety of the state. 
It must be borne in mind that there was no political 
freedom in Austria then; matters of public con- 

* See page 59. 



53 BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

cern were not allowed to be discussed, much less 
criticised, except among intimates. 

The work of resuscitating a dying race was a 
gigantic task, and but for the perseverance of the 
first apostles, the most promising branch of the 
Slavic linden tree would have withered. It was 
necessary to build theatres, to found learned so- 
cieties, to establish museums and libraries, to col- 
lect and edit rare books and manuscripts scattered 
in foreign countries, whither they had been carried 
by soldiers during the Thirty Years' War. The 
Austrian Government, instead of assisting in this 
work which had for its object the uplifting of a 
down-trodden people from ignorance, superstition, 
and bigotry, hindered it at every step. As an ex- 
ample of self-sacrificing patriotism, the case of a 
law student by the name of Rehof should be men- 
tioned. This man took a vow that he would dis- 
tribute as many Bohemian books as were said to 
have been burnt by the Jesuit Konias during the 
anti-reformation, that is, 60,000 volumes. S.ehof 
died some time in the late fifties of the nineteenth 
century, and he is said to have accomplished the 
greater part of his self-imposed task. When 
Jungmann, one of the greatest of the revivalists, 
died in 1847, "f^he patriots had an opportunity to 
review their growing ranks and they were aston- 
ished how the national movement had spread. 



A PLACE IN THE SUN 53 

" When we were returning home from the fu- 
neral," noted J. V. Fric in his memoirs, " I walked 
arm in arm with my father; we both felt proud 
like victors who were marching to further decisive 
battles. When father in the evening sat down for 
a chat with the family, he exclaimed, breathing 
freely as if a stone had rolled off his chest, ' Chil- 
dren, I think we shall win; there are too many of 
us; they can no longer trample us down.' " 

POLITICAL AWAKENING 

Up to 1848 Austrian subjects enjoyed cer- 
tain liberties : they could smoke, drink, and play 
cards without interference from the police. One 
enjoyment, however, was denied to them — they 
were not permitted to think. Prince Mettemich, 
the personification of absolutist Austria of those 
days, observed with alarm how the structure that 
he had been propping for years was beginning to 
settle in its foundations, and how ominous cracks 
appeared in it here and there. 

Revolution was in the air. Switzerland, Ger- 
many, and Italy were being engulfed by it. " The 
world is ill," Metternich complained in a letter to 
Count Apponyi. " Each day we can observe how 
the moral infection is spreading, and if you find me 
unyielding, it is because I am of a nature that will 
not give in before opposition." 



64 BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

The news of the fall of Louis Philippe in France 
reached Prague February 29, 1848. Next day, 
notwithstanding the strictest censorship, the city 
was aflame with revolutionary talk. The liberals 
in neighboring Germany had summoned delegates 
to meet at Frankfort, March 5th. Italy seethed 
with political excitement. Kossuth, in Hungary, 
demanded that a constitution be granted to the 
people in Austria. Overnight Metternich's elabo- 
rate system of government, maintained by the 
police and the military, was tumbling down like 
a house of cards. In Prague, as in other large 
centres, everybody clamored for a constitution, 
though the masses, educated as they were to re- 
gard the government as something above and apart 
from them, hardly comprehended what the word 
" constitution " meant. 

In the midst of the turmoil the sickly Emperor 
Ferdinand V. (1835-1848) abdicated in favor of 
his nephew, Francis Josef, then a youth of eighteen. 
The latter had been on the throne but a few weeks, 
when his advisers, Schwarzenberg, Windischgratz, 
Stadion, and others, decided to do away with the 
constitution of the revolutionists and to substitute 
it with an octroy constitution, the reason assigned 
being " the incapacity of parliament." The choice 
fell on this particular young man because Prince 
Schwarzenberg recommended as ruler " one whom 



A PLACE IN THE SUN 55 

he would not have to be ashamed to show to the 
troops." Though not relevant, it is interesting to 
recall how the present emperor acquired his cog- 
nomen. " What shall it be, gentlemen," asked 
Schwarzenberg in the ministerial council — " Fran- 
cis Josef, or simply Francis ? " A sub-secretary of 
state thought that plain Francis would sound 
very well indeed, but the fear having been ex- 
pressed that the name Francis might remind the 
Austrian nations too much of the ghost of Metter- 
nich, Francis Josef, instead of plain Francis, was 
chosen for the youthful monarch. 

To Windischgratz constitutions, ministries ac- 
countable to the people, and parliaments were 
abominations. He made no secret of the fact that 
he was opposed to the rule of lawyers; those alone 
who carried bayonets and muskets were entitled to 
be called patriots and saviors of the fatherland. 

Under the Premiership of Alexander Bach 
(1853-1859) the monarchy relapsed to the methods 
of police rule that obtained prior to 1848. The 
reactionaries who surrounded the throne encour- 
aged the youthful monarch to rule like an autocrat. 

Minister Bach, by the way a highly gifted man, 
who had in his early days trifled with radicalism, 
believed that an alliance between the church and 
the state would strengthen both and that against 
the unity of the altar and the throne the radicals 



56 BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

would be powerless. " The Austrian Monarchy," 
he confided to a noted clerical, " considering its 
peculiar structure, has only two firm bases on 
which it can rest in safety and unity, — ^the dynasty 
and the church." Accordingly he brought about, 
in 1855, the adoption of the famous concordat, a 
convention between the pope and the monarchy, 
a pact that increased immensely the legal power of 
the papacy in Austria. The concordat was abol- 
ished in 1868 because of the bitter opposition of 
the liberals, Bohemia, the land of Hus and 
Havlicek, fought the concordat openly and fear- 
lessly, suspecting in it a hidden menace to its 
freedom of conscience and to national aspirations. 

The uncompromising opposition of the Bohe- 
mians to Bach and to his policies visited upon them 
the wrath of Vienna. Under ^ach they were prob- 
ably subjected to oppression more ruthless and 
cruel than any they had experienced since the time 
of Ferdinand II. 

Patriots, some of them mere youths, were 
thrown in prison on the flimsiest accusation of 
police spies. It was not safe to converse in Bo- 
hemian in the streets of Prague. Spies were at 
the heels of every Bohemian prominent in public 
life. Police agents tried to connect Francis L. 
Rieger with a treasonable plot to disrupt the mon- 
archy and he had to flee the state to save himself 



A PLACE IN THE SUN 57 

from prison. Spies followed Palacky even to the 
sick-bed of his wife. The military authorities 
at Prague suspended the publication of Havlicek's 
famous newspaper, " Narodni Noviny," on the 
ground that its editor indulged in " immoderate 
language." Finding Prague closed to his paper, 
Havlicek made an attempt to publish it in Vienna. 
" I am determined not to issue licenses to any 
newspaper in Vienna ; we have enough newspapers 
as it is," replied General Welden to Havlicek's 
application for the license. " But there is no such 
newspaper in Vienna as I should like to publish," 
pleaded Havlicek. " My paper is intended to be 
an organ for Slavic matters and it is to be printed 
in Bohemian." Welden retorted angrily: " Wir 
sind hier Deutsche " (Here in Vienna we are Ger- 
mans), and the General's decision was irrevocable. 
Undaunted, Havlicek made other attempts to 
procure a newspaper license, and at last he ob- 
tained a promise that he might be allowed to 
publish a paper in Kutna Hora, a provincial town 
not far from Prague. In time even this paper was 
suppressed by the police and its editor arrested and 
interned in the province of Tyrol by Bach's order. 
It should, perhaps, be said that Havlicek was the 
one journalist whom neither threats nor offers of 
bribery could influence. There, separated from his 
wife and child, Havlicek gave way to brooding 



58 BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

which brought on a fatal brain disease. From 
Tyrol he was permitted to return home, broken 
in health and spirit. To the last Havhcek remained 
steadfast to the cause he had championed — the 
liberation from bondage of his nation. Havlicek's 
colors were red and white (Bohemian national 
colors), and neither threats nor favors could 
swerve him from his chosen path : * " They ban- 
ished you from the fatherland," wrote Pinkas to 
Havlicek, " but they transformed the fatherland 
itself into a fortress and a jail. We live here the 
most unhappy lives conceivable. Not a ray of light 
enters our intellectual prison to brighten it." 

The mere acquaintanceship with Palacky was 
enough to expose one to the chicanery of the police. 
Strobach, at one time Mayor of Prague and a 
former speaker of the short-lived parliament, was 
deposed as judge because, when presiding at a 
trial, he failed to hold a drunkard on a charge of 
lese majeste. Count Thun would not allow Rieger 
to lecture at the university for the reason, as he 

* Karel Havlicek (1821-1856) is in many respects the most note- 
worthy Bohemian of the nineteenth century. As a journalist, he had 
no equal among his contemporaries. His political articles were models 
of sound and mature reasoning and of lucid thinking. When argu- 
ments failed with the black reactionaries, lay and ecclesiastic, Havlicek 
employed another weapon with telling effect — ridicule. Bohemians 
venerate him as a martyr of their cause. The cultured immigrants 
to the United States from. Bohemia in the early days were imbued 
with Havlicek's spirit and ideas, and the present-day spread of free- 
thought among them is directly traceable to this Thomas Paine of 
Bohemia. 



A PLACE IN THE SUN 59 

stated, " that students would see in him a political 
agitator, not a professor." 

A demand was made on Palacky by the censor 
to strike out of his " History of the Bohemian 
Nation " the chapters relating to Hus and the Hus- 
site Wars. Even Prince Metternich, whose bu- 
reaucratic leanings were above suspicion, consid- 
ered the demand, which was equivalent to an order, 
unreasonable. After a great deal of haggling as to 
what was permissible and what should be deleted, 
a compromise was effected between the historian 
and the censor. However, Palacky's biographers all 
agreed that the terms of the compromise were not 
satisfactory to him. He is said to have expressed 
a hope that future historians, living in freer times 
than he, should tell the whole truth about the im- 
portance and meaning of the Hussite movement, 
which he was not allowed to do. The chapters re- 
lating to the Hussite times he wrote both in Bo- 
hemian and German. But because German critics 
had impugned his impartiality, he determined, as 
a protest, to continue with Bohemian as the original 
and German as a translation. When he announced 
his decision to the Land Committee, a protest was 
raised and he was warned not to publish the 
Bohemian text before the German; nor to do any- 
thing from which it might appear that the German 
text was not the original. 



60 BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

The famous physician, Hamernik, a pupil of the 
noted Skoda and Rokytansky, was removed from 
the university because the government suspected 
his political and religious views. 

The publication of every Bohemian newspaper 
in the land was suspended, except for two or three 
scientific and literary magazines, and the police 
would have liked to destroy even those, if decent 
pretext could have been found for their doing so. 

At one time the authorities were planning to 
dissolve the society of the Bohemian Museum and 
the Royal Society of Sciences. The discussions 
of these learned bodies did not seem patriotic 
enough from the Austrian point of view. The 
Matice Ceska — a society for the publication of 
standard literature — was threatened in its exist- 
ence, and only the influence of some of its promi- 
nent members saved it from the fury of the al- 
mighty police. 

Pogodin, the Russian scholar, had recommended 
the Matice to publish the works of Hus. " God 
prevent," answered Safafik to Pogodin's letter 
(1857). "Who would think of publishing books 
on Hus in Austria? — yes, if they were against Hus 
— 'that would be simple." 

Before Krejci's work on geology could be pub- 
lished, every page, nay every line, was carefully 
scanned, and when that was done the manuscript 



A PLACE IN THE SUN 61 

was ordered to be submitted for approval to a 
learned priest, to make sure that it contained noth- 
ing contrary to the teaching of the church. 
Palacky, who was always dreaming of his pet 
scheme of the publication of a Bohemian encyclo- 
pedia, was told that " under the existing press laws 
it would be unwise to urge the matter." 

In honor of the emperor's marriage (1854) the 
government showed clemency to certain political 
persons; yet, in general, conditions remained un- 
changed. Patriots who had been expelled from 
Prague could return, but city or country, their 
movements were watched by the police. Slad- 
kovsky, a famous journalist whose publications 
had been ruined by censorship, applied for a license 
to start a coal yard with which to support 
his family. The application was promptly dis- 
allowed. Young Fric, a literary rebel, planned to 
issue a volume of poetry with the collaboration of 
the younger set of writers. This warning was re- 
ceived from Vienna: " Let Fric beware; if he does 
not desist in his dangerous course, he may again 
find himself interned in a fortress." The police 
directors and press censors suspected the loyalty 
of everyone who ventured to write in Bohemian. 
" I fail to comprehend," remonstrated Police Di- 
rector Weber with Fric, " why you persist in this 
ridiculous nonsense; in about six years there will 



63 BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

be nothing left of your Bohemian literature, any- 
way." 

On another occasion Weber gave Fric to under- 
stand that Bohemia was a German territory, and 
that if he wished to live in it he must obey German 
laws. Yet Fric was incorrigible. For his intract- 
ability and because he would not share Weber's 
view that his nation was doomed to extinction, he 
was banished to the hills of Transylvania. 

On the battlefields at Magenta and Solferino in 
Italy in 1859, the absolutist rule of Bach, which 
derived its chief support from the bureaucracy, 
the military, and the clerical party, came to an 
abrupt end. The progressive element clamored for 
reforms. Bach was dismissed from office and his 
successor (Goluchowski) announced that in the 
future the state budget would be subject to the 
scrutiny of the people and that provincial diets 
would be invited to legislate on their needs. The 
last part of the program the federalists interpreted 
to mean that the principle of local self-government 
had at last been recognized. 

In the Bohemian Diet a prominent member, en- 
couraged by the program of the new premier, 
moved, amid genuine enthusiasm of the federalists, 
that a deputation of the diet be appointed to go 
to Vienna and urge the emperor to have himself 
crowned king in Prague. When, subsequently, a 



A PLACE IN THE SUN 63 

deputation of the diet secured an audience from 
the ruler, he declared (1861) : " I will be crowned 
in Prague as King of Bohemia, and I am con- 
vinced that this ceremony will cement anew the in- 
dissoluble tie of confidence and loyalty between 
My throne and My Bohemian Kingdom." 

Bohemians were elated. At last their ideal of 
autonomous Bohemia seemed at the point of real- 
ization. 

Here a few words should be said concerning 
the constitution under which Austrians were 
to begin a new parliamentary life. The much- 
heralded and impatiently awaited document was 
drafted by Minister Schmerling, a staunch cen- 
tralist, and because it was promulgated in Febru- 
ary (1861) it was called the "Constitution of 
February." As soon as its text had been made 
public, the Slavs instantly recognized that the 
statesmen in Vienna had not profited in the slight- 
est from the lessons of 1848. Minister Schmer- 
ling, was, like all Germans, obsessed with the no- 
tion that German hegemony was indispensable to 
the safety and greatness of the state. Accordingly 
he subordinated every other idea and interest to 
that one obsession. A most ingenious electoral sys- 
tem was evolved whereby Germans, though in 
minority, were able to control, not only the central 
parliament, but the provincial diets as well. The 



64f BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

scheme was to favor the cities, wealthy individual 
taxpayers, and chambers of commerce (which 
groups then were German in sentiment) to the dis- 
advantage of the agricultural districts inhabited 
by the Slavs. How the electoral law worked in 
Bohemia one can perceive from the fact that in 
1873 2,500,000 Bohemians were able to elect only 
34 deputies, while 1,500,000 Germans contrived 
to return 56 deputies. The powers of the provin- 
cial diets were reduced to a minimum, the control- 
ling idea, of course, being to keep centred in 
Vienna the entire power of the state. By reason 
of this juggling the Bohemian element found it- 
self in minority in its own Land Diet. 

Although distrustful because of the partisanship 
evinced in the constitution, the Bohemians never- 
theless entered parliament, but they did so upon 
the express understanding that their participation 
therein should not be in any manner prejudicial to 
the historical rights of their kingdom. 

Generally speaking, the Austrian nations, from 
the very first day their representatives were per- 
mitted to enter the legislative halls, divided them- 
selves into two political parties, federalists and cen- 
tralists. The federalists favored granting self-gov- 
ernment to the various races ; the centralists, who 
were backed by the German masses, opposed this. 
Austria, according to the latter, was lost to the Ger- 



A PLACE IN THE SUN 65 

man cause the moment the agitation " Away from 
Vienna " had gained the upper hand. For reasons 
of self-protection the Slavs, led by the Bohemians, 
inclined toward federalism, as more likely to sat- 
isfy their national aspirations. Instead of a Teu- 
tonic Austria, the Slavs desired a United States 
of Austria that should be just and impartial to all. 

For months the Bohemians waited, but to their 
surprise and dismay the government took no steps 
to make effective the emperor's promise. On the 
contrary, the increasing persecution of their press, 
the brutal partiality of the speaker of parliament, 
the hostile attitude of the executive organs of the 
government were signs, the significance of which 
could not be doubted. The discouraging truth 
dawned on them at last that the emperor had no 
intention of keeping his word and of giving home 
rule to his Bohemian subjects. 

Deceived by their sovereign and realizing 
that neither reason nor justice would influence 
Vienna, they decided, in 1863, as a means of pro- 
test and to show their deep resentment, to leave the 
parliament in a body. On June 17th of that year 
they issued a statement in which the grievances 
of the nation were set forth at length. For sixteen 
years after that no Bohemian legislator appeared 
in the Austrian Parliament. And while this may 
not have been a sagacious course — indeed, sub- 



66 BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

sequent events have shown that the " policy of 
abstinence," as the padiamentary boycott came to 
be known, almost irreparably prejudiced their posi- 
tion — yet, as a protest of an outraged nation, it 
was magnificent. 

DUALISM— A BLUNDER AND A CRIME 

Up to 1867 the Hapsburg Monarchy was, out- 
wardly at least, a Teutonic state. But in 1866, 
having been decisively beaten by Prussia at Sadova, 
it found itself facing a new destiny. Expelled 
from the Germanic Bund of which it had been a 
leading member, the championship wrested from 
it by victorious Hohenzollerns, rent by internal 
discord, its statesmen concurred in the opinion 
that reconstruction of some kind was inevitable. 
But what course of action should be pursued? 
Should the government again have recourse to the 
shop- worn policy of rigid centralization and Ger- 
manization which had been tried by Austrian 
Premiers time and time again and invariably found 
wanting ? 

That Hungary should be given back her auton- 
omy was conceded beforehand. Weakened by war, 
its military prestige shattered, its finances at a low 
ebb, the government was in no condition to resist 
the Magyars, who had assumed a threatening atti- 
tude. But what about the Bohemians, who also 



A PLACE IN THE SUN 67 

clamored for recognition? Bohemia, Hungary, 
and Austria, it will be remembered, had formed a 
union in 1 526-1 527 on terms of equality. And 
then how should the larger Slavic questions be 
settled ? Numerically the Slavs were the strongest 
element in the monarchy. If allowed to elect repre- 
sentatives to one central parliament, these discon- 
tented Bohemians, Poles, Slovaks, and Croatians 
might one day, uniting politically, control the coun- 
try. Tacitly Vienna and Budapest agreed that, 
whatever the terms of the settlement with Hun- 
gary, the disaster of Slavic majority must be 
averted. 

" The Slavs must be pressed to the wall " 
(Man wird die Slaven an die Wand driicken), 
declared a statesman who participated actively in 
the plan of reconstruction. " You," addressing 
the Magyars, " will take care of your hosts [mean- 
ing the Slavs] and we shall take care of ours," 

In the parliament the cause of the Slavic fed- 
eralists was lost beforehand; a German-made 
constitution and German-made electoral law ren- 
dered futile every opposition. Besides, the govern- 
ment would brook no interference with its plan of 
reconstruction as outlined by Count Beust.* This 

* Friedrich Ferdinand Beust, a Saxon statesman, entered the serv- 
ices of Austria soon after the disaster at Sadova. It was he who 
brought to a successful termination the Settlement between Vienna 
and Hungary. The centralists were at first opposed to the division 



68 BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

plan contemplated a dual government, one in 
Vienna, the other in Budapest, and three parlia- 
ments, one to sit in Vienna for the Austrian half, 
one to meet in Budapest for the Hungarian half, 
and a third one to be called the " Delegations " 
and to convene alternately at both capitals to de- 
liberate on matters common to the empire as 
a whole, such as foreign relations, the army, 
navy, finances, and so forth. In other words, 
Beust's plan provided for two seats of centraliza- 
tion instead of one. From a German state that it 
had been before 1867 Austria became a German- 
Magyar state — an organization without precedent 
or analogy. 

The several kingdoms, crown-lands, etc., were 
divided under Beust's plan; and, upon the consum- 
mation of the deal, were allotted to the contract- 
ing parties to the dualism as follows: Austria 
received Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia, Bukovina, Dal- 
matia, Galicia, Carinthia, Carniola, Trieste and vi- 
cinity, Goritz and Gradiska, Istria, Lower Austria, 
Upper Austria, Salzburg, Styria, Tyrol, Voralberg. 
Hungary secured as her part of the bargain Hun- 
gary Proper, Transylvania, Fiume, Croatia, Sla- 
vonia, and the Military Frontier. 

of Austria in two, but were eventually placated by Beust, he having 
convinced them that dualism meant the permanent subjugation of the 
Slavs. The above remark, " Die Slaven werden an die Waad 
gedriickt," is attributed to him. 



A PLACE IN THE SUN 69 

Figures, better than anything else, will explain 
why the Slavs were opposed to dualism and pres- 
ently became its irreconcilable enemies. Under 
the Austrian roof Beust put these Slavic groups 
(quoting from the census of 1910) : 

Bohemians 6,435,983 

Poles 4,967,984 

Slovenes 1,252,940 

Serbo-Croatians 7^3,334 

Little Russians 3,608,844 

Total 17,049,085 

Under the Magyar domination fell the follow- 
ing Slavs: 

Slovaks 1,967,970 

Croatians 1,833,167 

Serbs 1,106,471 

Little Russians 472,587 

5,380,195 

Beust's scheme was audaciously clever. By 
dividing the monarchy in two he divided the Slavs; 
and, separated and isolated, they were made easier 
victims of Magyarization in Hungary and of Ger- 
manization in Austria. A crying injustice of this 
shameful bargain was that the " high contracting 



70 BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

parties " tore apart peoples of the same race, set- 
ting up a political barrier where nature intended 
that none should exist. Austria, for instance, had 
been awarded Dalmatia, the population of which 
is almost wholly Croatian; yet Slavonia and 
Croatia, which is also Croatian to the core (or 
Serbo-Croation), went to Hungary. Bohemians of 
Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia were lodged under 
the Austrian roof; the Slovaks, on the other side, 
who are almost one with the Bohemian race, were 
put under the guardianship of Hungary. Nations 
and races were moved on the Austrian chess-board 
like so many pawns — ^exactly the same way as at 
the Vienna Congress in 1814 and at the Berlin 
Conference in 1878. 

" No people in the monarchy were more unjustly 
prejudiced by dualism than the Bohemians," is the 
opinion of Denis. " Every article of the Settle- 
ment affected their interests most adversely. Their 
kinsmen, the Croatians and Serbs, and particularly 
the Slovaks — the latter always confidently looked 
upon as a reserve force of the nation — were handed 
out to merciless and unfeeling masters. The crown 
of St. Vaclav (St. Vaclav is honored as patron saint 
of Bohemia) was reduced by Vienna to a position 
of semi-vassalage and given equal rank with a 
medley of outlying and insignificant provinces. 
Dualism condemned the Slavs to be the unwilling 



A PLACE IN THE SUN 71' 

tools of a policy to which they had been opposed. 
Bohemia, the richest and most productive land in 
the empire, was made to bear the heaviest quota of 
the burden with which statesmen had saddled the 
Austrian half of the monarchy." Condemning 
dualism, Dr. Edward Gregr, in a famous speech 
delivered in parliament, declared " that it would 
be wisest to tear down to its foundations the ram- 
shackle building that made every tenant dissatis- 
fied, that lacked light and air, that neither expense 
nor labor could make habitable, and to build upon 
the ruins an edifice answering the manifold needs 
of its inhabitants. In the judgment of Dr. 
Menger " (a German deputy), thundered Gregr, 
" this would be a treason and I confess that it 
would be a treason. Yet, is not dualism a treason 
on the rights and liberties of the peoples of this 
state and particularly on the rights and liberties of 
our Bohemian nation ? " 

And because the settlement between Austria 
and Hungary had been effected without the co- 
operation, much less the consent of the Bohemians, 
whose claims were utterly disregarded — it will be 
remembered that at that time, 1867, they were 
boycotting the parliament — a series of political 
duels were fought between Vienna and Prague, 
which in the end resulted In the defeat of the 
weaker antagonist, that is, Prague. 



72 BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

In the spring of 1867 the Prague Diet was sum- 
moned to elect deputies to the parhament which 
was to vote on the settlement with Hungary. The 
Bohemians refused to elect such deputies and en- 
tered instead a vigorous protest against being in- 
corporated in Austria-Hungary, then in process of 
formation. The only state they recognized was 
the Bohemian Kingdom and this had as much right 
to autonomy as Hungary. Promptly the govern- 
ment dissolved the diet and ordered new elections. 
At these elections, thanks to the ingenious electoral 
law, the Bohemians were defeated and the German 
minority, now master in the diet, proceeded to elect 
delegates to the Vienna Parliament. The Bo- 
hemians declared this election unconstitutional and 
fraudulent. Deputies so elected, they maintained, 
were not true representatives of the people and 
could not, therefore, legally or morally bind 
the nation in parliament. Having issued this pro- 
test, the Bohemians left the diet, and the next 
year, instead of returning, issued their memorable 
Declaration of Rights, bearing date August 22, 
1868. They continued to boycott the Land Diet 
until 1870. 

The government was by no means tardy in mak- 
ing the rebels feel that they needed to be disci- 
plined for their refusal to participate in the labors 
of the parliament. The Director of Police in 



A PLACE IN THE SUN 73 

Prague received orders to see to it " that Bohe- 
mian newspapers moderate their tone." That, of 
course, meant the inevitable lawsuits, police 
chicanery, confiscation, fines, jail. 

To break the rebellious spirit of the Bohemians 
the government sent Baron Koller to Prague, as 
Military Governor, — a soldier of the Radecky type 
of Austrian generals — brutal, violent. One of his 
first acts was to place the capital under martial 
law (1868). Koller suspended the publication of 
nearly every Bohemian newspaper. Arrests for 
political crimes became so numerous that the jail 
of the New Town (one of the Boroughs of 
Prague) held at one time 400 prisoners, though 
there was room only for 250 persons. During 
1868 in Prague alone Koller sent to jail 144 per- 
sons who were convicted of political misdemeanors 
and crimes. The total penalties aggregated 81 
years. How many prisoners there were in the 
provincial towns in Bohemia and Moravia is only 
conjectured, but it was asserted afterwards that 
there had been five times as many as in Prague, so 
that the total number of political prisoners in 
Bohemia in 1868 was about 700. 

When the Premier tried to placate the Bo- 
hemian opposition by suspending martial law 
(April, 1869) in Prague, the centralists became 
furious. Bohemian autonomy, declared their 



74. BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

organ, the Vienna " Neue Freie Presse," is an 
issue that only force can solve ; the unification of 
the Bohemian Crown may be of vital moment to 
the Bohemians, but the Germans will never give 
their consent. 

FRANCIS JOSEF, A WORD-BREAKER 

At last wiser counsel prevailed in Vienna, and 
while certain members favored repression, even 
force, to bring the Bohemians to submission, there 
were others, Count Taaffe among them, who urged 
moderation. The Potocki ministry (1870) tried 
to breach the differences between Prague and 
Vienna. More successful than Potocki was Count 
Hohenwart, whom the emperor encouraged to 
make terms with the Bohemians. Hohenwart's 
first step was to name two distinguished Bo- 
hemians, Jirecek and Habetinek, members of his 
cabinet. The " Neue Freie Presse " commented on 
Hohenwart's appointment as " the Sedan of Ger- 
man ideals in Austria." Hohenwart's next step 
was to select an Austrian commission, in co- 
operation with a similar commission of Bohemians, 
headed by Count Clam-Martinic and Dr. Rieger, 
to draft terms of settlement, which came to be 
known as the " Fundamental Articles." These 
" Fundamentals " defined precisely the future rela- 
tions of Bohemia and Austria. In the " Funda- 



A PLACE IN THE SUN 75 

mentals " one could clearly discern Palacky's ideas 
of federalistic Austria. 

Thereupon an imperial rescript was issued, 
bearing date September 12, 1871, in which the 
emperor made this memorable promise : " Recog- 
nizing the state rights of the Bohemian Crown, 
calling to mind the renown and power which the 
crown has conferred upon Us and Our prede- 
cessors, and mindful further of the unwavering 
loyalty with which the people of Bohemia have 
at all times supported Our throne, We are glad 
to recognize the rights of this kingdom and are 
ready to renew this recognition by Our coronation 
oath." * 

Obviously it was not the mere mediaeval cere- 
mony of coronation that Bohemians were anxious 
to have take place. By having himself crowned as 
king, the sovereign would affirm by implication 
that the Kingdom of Bohemia, the Margravate 

* *' Eingedenkt der Staatsrechtlichen Stellung der Krone Bohmens 
und des Glanzes und der Macht bewusst, welche dieselbe Uns und 
Unseren Vorfahren verliehen hat, eingedenkt ferner der unerschiitt- 
lichen Treue, mit welchen die Bevolkerung Bohmens jederzeit Unseren 
Thron stutzte, erkennen wir gerne die Rechte dieses Konigreiches an 
und sind bereit diese Anerkennung mit Unserem Kronungseide zu 
erneuern." 

Among the many titles of Francis Josef are those of " Emperor of 
Austria," " King of Hungary," " King of Bohemia," etc. Strictly 
speaking, Francis Josef has no legal claim to the title " King of 
Bohemia." He has never taken the coronation oath; and, without 
such an oath, he is no more King than Woodrow Wilson would be 
President of the United States without iirst taking the oath of office. 
Logically, therefore, Francis Josef is an unlawful ruler of the Bo- 
hemian Kingdom. 



76 BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

of Moravia, and the Duchy of Silesia were one 
and indivisible; that Bohemia was a part of the 
monarchy only as long as the Hapsburgs survived 
in the male or female line; that in the event of 
the Hapsburg-Lothringen line becoming extinct, 
Bohemia was free to elect its own ruler ; that the 
power of legislation was vested jointly in the 
king and in the diets and that the king, upon 
taking the coronation oath, bound himself to de- 
fend the indissolubility of the Bohemian Crown. 

In answer to the emperor's declaration the diet 
passed in its sessions of October 8 and lo, 1871, 
the " Fundamental Articles." Meantime the cen- 
tralists worked indefatigably to defeat the settle- 
ment with Bohemia. Their journals employed 
every means to prejudice public opinion against it. 
" Austria is about to capitulate to the Slavs," wrote 
these journals, " and Prague will eventually super- 
sede Vienna as the capital of the empire." 

It is known that Bismarck, fearing that Bo- 
hemian home rule might have a stimulating effect 
on his Poles, and Andrassy, solicitous about the 
" welfare " of his Slovaks, jointly intrigued to 
defeat the autonomy which Premier Hohenwart 
was ready to concede. " Hungary will have noth- 
ing in common with Slavic Austria," declared the 
" Pester Lloyd," speaking for the Hungarian 
Government. " We Hungarians shall do every- 



A PLACE IN THE SUN 7T 

thing in our power to frustrate the reconstruction. 
Call it selfishness, if you will, but that shall be our 
policy." 

The victory of the Prussians over the French 
in 1 87 1 naturally made the Austro-German cen- 
tralists more stubborn than ever, and Hohenwart, 
despairing of the passage in the parliament of the 
" Fundamental Articles," resigned October 30th. 
For the second time since 1848 the rehabilitation 
of the Bohemian State had been frustrated. That 
the emperor, always vacillating and ever fearful of 
the Pan-Germans, was not himself without blame, 
is obvious. In fact, it is charged that the coterie 
of archdukes around the throne welcomed oppo- 
sition to Bohemian home rule, if it did not secretly 
foment it. 

A new rescript commanded the diet to elect 
delegates to the parliament. Refusing to do this, 
the diet was dissolved. The Auersperg-Lasser 
Ministry which followed Hohenwart was out- 
spokenly German-centralistic and Bohemian au- 
tonomists made ready for another onslaught from 
Vienna. 

NEW PERSECUTIONS 

For the second time the " opposition tamer," 
Baron Koller, was appointed Governor of Bo- 
hemia. To Moravia was sent the notorious 



78 BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

Bohemiophobe, Baron Weber. As usual, the press 
was the first to feel the heel of these little despots. 
Public prosecutors throughout Bohemia and Mo- 
ravia received instructions to proceed " fearlessly " 
against opposition journals. Those prosecutors 
who replied that they would do their duty strictly 
" in accordance with the law " were either removed 
or transferred to other posts and replaced by func- 
tionaries who were more mindful of the needs of 
the government. " It is not necessary in every 
instance to set forth the reason for the confisca- 
tion of a newspaper article," the prosecutors were 
instructed. " The prosecutors have a full power 
to act and they are answerable to no one." Dur- 
ing the first year of the Auersperg-Lasser Minis- 
try the daily newspaper " Politik " in Prague was 
confiscated 83 times by the conscientious prose- 
cutor. A number of societies were dissolved, 
though non-political in character. An agricultural 
organization that had been founded during the 
reign of Maria Theresa and had survived the bitter 
days of Bach's administration, was deprived of 
its charter because its president. Prince Charles 
Schwarzenberg, a Bohemian noble, declined to 
participate in the Vienna Exposition unless a sepa- 
rate space was allotted there to Bohemia, as to 
Hungary. Every presiding officer of the so-called 
District Committees in the provinces, who was 



A PLACE IN THE SUN 79 

suspected of being a Bohemian sympathizer, was 
summarily removed. Two of the most noted 
journalists, Julius Gregr and J. St. Skrejsovsky, 
who had the courage to fight the Auersperg-Lasser 
Ministry openly, were put in jail for an alleged 
attempt to defraud the government of a trifling 
tax with which newspaper advertisements were 
assessable. Both languished in jail for months. 
As an instance of official meanness, the case of the 
publisher of the " Correspondence Slave " should 
be mentioned. This man received a long term in 
prison for failure to pay a newspaper tax amount- 
ing to less than half a florin (20 cents). 

And because Bohemian juries almost uniformly 
acquitted journalists brought before them for po- 
litical offenses, prosecuting attorneys resorted to 
the expedient of a change of venue to cities in- 
habited by Germans. To eminent jurists protesting 
that a procedure of this kind was unconstitutional, 
the Minister of Justice replied that state necessities 
justified this course. On one occasion a deputation 
of representative citizens of Prague called on 
Baron Koller to complain of the arbitrariness of 
the police. " Gentlemen, I hope you do not wish 
me to be uncivil to you. I am exceedingly busy, 
and inasmuch as I have nothing to say to you, I 
must ask you to leave the room in five minutes.'' 
And when the deputation, incensed over Roller's 



80 BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

brusqueness, wished to explain, the redoubtable 
baron exclaimed : " Gentlemen, the five minutes 
are up. Leave." A door was opened, and in the 
ante-room stood a sentry with fixed bayonet. 

The year 1879 witnessed the end of the " policy 
of abstinence." Due, largely, to Premier Taafife's 
persuasion and promises, Bohemians re-entered the 
parliament. From Taaffe and his successors in 
office they obtained some political concessions 
(crumbs fallen from the opulent table of the mas- 
ter, to repeat a current expression of the opposi- 
tion), yet the supreme ideal of the nation, auton- 
omy, is to-day no nearer fulfillment than it ever 
was. If they thought that they might be able to 
convince Vienna of the injustice of dualism and 
might by parliamentary pressure force it to grant 
to them home rule of which they had been twice 
cheated, they had reckoned wrongly. Not only 
did they fail to bring Vienna to terms, but they 
were made to feel that another foe, powerful and 
implacable, blocked their way to national freedom. 
That foe was Berlin. For it must not be forgotten 
that, since the formation of the Triple Alliance, 
Berlin influence at Vienna, always great, had be- 
come predominant. If the two Teutonic partners 
were agreed on any one thing, it was on the propo- 
sition that Slavic trees in Austria should not grow 
too tall. 



A PLACE IN THE SUN 81 

To conduct the reader through the maze of 
purely local happenings that occurred since Taaffe's 
administration would be a long, though not wholly- 
uninteresting story. Suffice it to say that during 
most of the time Bohemians were forced to fight 
on two fronts — Vienna on one front and their 
fellow-countrymen with Pan-German leanings on 
the other. The main quarrel between Vienna 
and Prague during all these years has been over 
Home Rule. Shall Bohemians living in the coun- 
tries comprising the Bohemian Crown (Bohemia, 
Moravia, Silesia) be the arbiters of their own 
destiny, and shall they govern themselves from 
Prague by laws made and enacted by their home 
parliament? Home Rule is and has been the main 
issue ; all else is subordinate to it. 

WAR WITHOUT SANCTION OF PARLIAMENT 

In 1908 the German minority in the Bohemian 
Diet proposed a plan aiming at a division of Bo- 
hemia into two administrative parts, German and 
Bohemian. This plan the Bohemians vehemently 
combated, as they had consistently opposed like 
schemes in the past. They claimed that to rend 
the kingdom into two halves, Bohemian and Ger- 
man, was both impracticable and dangerous. Im- 
practicable, because it would condemn to inevitable 



82 BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

Germanization the very strong Bohemian minori- 
ties living in German districts on the border. 
Dangerous, because there were good reasons for 
believing that German Bohemia would gravitate 
toward Berlin, rather than toward Prague or 
Vienna, Their scheme having been blocked, the 
Germans availed themselves of obstructive tactics 
in the diet, with the result that a deadlock ensued. 
As usual, the Vienna Government hurried to the 
assistance of the Germans. Bohemian leaders 
were made to understand that they must yield in 
the Prague Diet, or suffer punishment in the par- 
liament. However, neither threats nor promises 
moved the Bohemians; they made it plain that 
they would not submit to further political extor- 
tions. Unable to break the deadlock in Bohemia 
and unwilling to abandon the Germans in their 
hopeless struggle for the maintenance of Teutonic 
hegemony in Austria, the Vienna Government, as 
a last desperate means of saving its compatriots 
from political defeat, suspended what there was 
still left of Bohemian autonomy on July 26, 191 3, 
one year before the outbreak of the war, having 
previously advised the Berlin Government of its 
intention. The diet was dissolved, although new 
elections had not been ordered, as the law pro- 
vided, and in place of the autonomous Land 
Executive, the government appointed an Imperial 



A PLACE IN THE SUN 83 

Commission to govern Bohemia. This was the 
beginning of an absolutist era in the kingdom. 

The echo of the deadlock in Bohemia was at 
once heard in parliament. Promptly the Bohe- 
mians carried the fight to the imperial assembly, 
thus crippling its functions. And so it happened 
that, on the eve of the Great War, the highest 
legislative tribunal of the empire did not meet 
and the nations were not consulted as to whether 
or not they wished war. The ruler alone decided 
this momentous question by taking recourse to the 
famous paragraph fourteen of the constitution 
which, in certain cases, allows him to act alone 
without the co-operation or advice of the parlia- 
ment.* This situation really suited the wishes of 
the government clique, which knew beforehand 
that the Slavs would have resolutely opposed the 
war if given an opportunity. Certain it is that the 
Bohemians would have raised their voice against 
the mad adventure against Serbia and would have 
declared in no unequivocal language that a ruler 

* The elusive paragraph fourteen of the constitution (bearing date 
December 21, 1867) has been the cause of some of the bitterest fights 
in parliament. It virtually nullifies constitutionalism in Austria, per- 
mitting as it does the emperor and his ministers to rule the land " in 
case of urgent necessities " without parliament. Past experience has 
shown that these " necessities " arise quite often. Paragraph fourteen 
is a bulwark of strength to the German party against which the Bohe- 
mians have battled in vain. Under paragraph fourteen the ruler cannot 
change ihe fundamental laws of the realm, contract permanent loans, 
and alienate public property. Aside from this there is nothing to 
curb his absolutism. Parliament may impeach the ministers for ex- 



M BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

who had twice broken his solemn promise to 
them had little claim on their loyalty. 

In a hundred different ways the nation is being 
wronged and held back, and no lasting relief is 
possible so long as the deadening centralistic, anti- 
Slavic policy obtains, so long as the state recog- 
nizes master races and servant races and accords 
different treatment to each. 

To every one of its political and cultural de- 
mands Vienna is ready to plead reasons of state, 
policies of state, principles of state, necessities of 
state. If the grumbling is too loud the malcontents 
are given to understand : " If you are not satisfied 
in Austria, you may have a chance to become Prus- 
sians." 

" Our nation is in a grave danger," said Palacky, 
" and surrounded on all sides by enemies. Yet I 
believe that it will conquer in the end, if it is 
only determined." And the Bohemian nation is 
determined, determined to the last man, to fight 
for its life, its liberty, and its happiness. 

ceeding their powers, but this safeguard is really no safeguard at all. 
The German text of paragraph fourteen is as follows: 

" Wenn sich die dringende Nothwendigkeit solchen Anordnungen, zu 
welchem verfassungsmassig die Zustimmung des Reichsrathes erforder- 
lich ist, zu einer Zeit herausstellt, wo dieser nicht versammelt ist, 
so konnen dieselben unter Verantwortung des Gesammtministeriums 
durch Kaiserliche Verordnung erlassen werden, in soferne solche 
keine Abanderung des Staatsgrundgesetzes bezwecken, keine dauernde 
Belastung des Staatschatzes, und keine Verauserung von Staatsgut 
betreffen. Solche Verordnungen haben provisorische Gesetzkraft, wenn 
sie von sammtlichen Ministern unterzeichnet sind, und mit ausdriick- 
licher Beziehung auf diese Bestimmung des Staatsgrundgesetzes 
kundgemacht werden." 



A PLACE IN THE SUN 86 

HAPSBURGS DISTRUSTED 
If there is one thing deeply rooted in the minds 
of the Bohemian people it is the belief, or rather 
the conviction, that the Hapsburgs, beginning with 
Ferdinand II. and ending with Francis Josef, the 
present sovereign, one and all planned the Ger- 
manization of the nation. Vienna newspapers 
make much of the fact that Bohemia has advanced 
under the rule of Francis Josef as under no other 
Hapsburg — and they seek to convey the impres- 
sion that this remarkable renascence should be 
credited to his reign. If Francis Josef had had his 
way, Bohemians argue, they would to-day be like 
the Slavs along the Elbe who have succumbed to 
Germanization, and Prague would be as German 
as Leipzig or Vienna. Their own determination 
to live saved them from extinction. All that the 
nation is and all that it has attained it has accom- 
plished through its own effort, without help from 
Vienna, often in the face of the bitterest opposi- 
tion from that quarter. Deny it as much as you 
will, the truth remains that Bohemians, remem- 
bering their experience with Ferdinand II., have 
always distrusted the Hapsburgs; and Francis 
Josef has done nothing, despite the splendid oppor- 
tunities of his remarkably long reign, to dispel 
that feeling of distrust. For, who was it but a 
Hapsburg who, in the first half of the seventeenth 



86 BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

century, turned their fatherland into a waste, driv- 
ing into exile the flower of the nation ? Who but 
a Hapsburg put a tombstone on the sepulchre of 
the nation, and who but a Hapsburg tried to 
smother its spirit under that tombstone? Who 
but a Hapsburg caused the persecution and jail- 
ing of the revivalists who undertook the task of 
awakening the nation ? And who but a Hapsburg 
twice violated, twice broke his solemn promise 
to the nation, first in 1861, and again in 1871? 
Who but a Hapsburg, by approving of the dual- 
istic system of government in 1867, intrigued to 
barter them away, with the rest of the Slavs, into 
political bondage? 

LOYALTY AND UNITY 

Reading the utterances of Austrian officials in 
the United States one is almost persuaded to be- 
lieve that the reports of mutinies in the early 
stages of the war and of disaffection of Slavic 
troops were pure inventions of a hostile press, that 
the nations in the Hapsburg Monarchy Avere en- 
thusiastic and united * on the question of war and 

* The register of prisoners at Kiev shows 114,000 were taken in 
the Carpathian fighting during the two months before the fall of 
Przemysl, and some difficulty has been found in preventing racial 
troubles among the enormous colony from captives. German Uhlan 
soldiers, hearing of the fall of Przemysl, declared that it must have 
been due to the treachery of " that Czech Kusmanek," whereupon a 
Czech officer struck him. The fight spread and the participants had 
to be separated. — Cable item from Russia. 



A PLACE IN THE SUN 87 

that stories of oppression of non-Germanic peoples 
were baseless, lacking the foundation of truth. A 
member of one of the consular staffs made a pretty 
speech before the New York Twilight Club in 
which he tried to convince his hearers that it was 
an old-time policy of the Austrian Government to 
treat justly and impartially all its subjects, irre- 
spective of race, for does not the Hofburg in 
Vienna, the residence of the emperor, bear the 
proud legend, " Justice to all nations is the funda- 
ment of Austria " ? 

Is it really true that the Austrian troops are 
and were loyal, that none shot their officers and 
none surrendered to the Russians or to the Serbi- 
ans when an opportunity presented ? Do not these 
very denials of mutiny and disaffection sound sus- 
picious? Mutiny of troops is admittedly unknown 
in the German Army, and none have been, so far 
as we know, reported from the French or English 
Armies. Neither the Germans, nor the English, 
nor the French officials in this country have felt 
the need to make public affirmation or denial where 
silence should have been most eloquent. If the 
Austro-Hungarian officials are so sure of their 
case, why do they make an exception and 
try to refute what in the case of the other 
warring countries is understood as a matter of 
course ? 



88 BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

Before we could give unreserved credence to 
these official assurances, we should like to hear 
the other side of the story. But, it so happens that 
the other side cannot now be presented. Every 
newspaper in Austria, without an exception (par- 
ticularly opposition journals printed in any of the 
Slavic languages), is edited by the government. 
The government censor is editor of all journals 
published in the empire, and the newspapers are 
given the choice either to print what the Imperial 
Royal Press Bureau sends them or have the 
articles promptly confiscated. As a result of this 
complete muzzling of the press, there is now but 
one kind of public opinion in Austria — ^the censor's 
opinion. According to the Prague journals, which 
reach the United States, Austrians are winning 
everywhere — on land, at sea, and in the air. 
Police agents plan fraternal and loyal meetings of 
Germans and Slavs, and the police agents' faithful 
ally, the censor, writes them up in the newspapers 
and the Imperial Royal Press Bureau in Vienna 
sends broadcast glowing accounts of them. Again, 
many of the leading men of the Bohemian nation 
are in jail or under strict police surveillance and 
cannot speak. Are we to believe that all the Aus- 
trian races fight enthusiastically? Precisely the 
opposite of this is true. With the exception of a 
fraction of the Galician Poles, the Slavs were en- 



A PLACE IN THE SUN 89 

tirely opposed to the war with Serbia.* Unfortu- 
nately they have no voice in the foreign policy of 
the monarchy; if their warnings and pleadings, as 
reflexed in their press, had been heeded, war 
against Serbia would never have been undertaken. 
Slavs are battling under the Austro-Hungarian 
standards because they cannot help themselves. 
Yet their hearts are not in the fight. Even the 
dullest and least informed mind will guess, not- 



* The Slavs in Austria-Hungary are divided into the following racial 
groups : 

1. The Bohemians. Inhabit Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia. Strong 
settlements are found in Austria (the city of Vienna alone being the 
home of not less than 300,000, according to some estimates 500,- 
000) and in Prussian Silesia. 

2. The Slovaks. Settled in the northwestern part of Hungary and 
in Moravia. 

Professor Lubor Niederle, who is recognized as an authority on 
Slavic matters, computed in 1900 the strength of the Bohemians, to- 
gether with the Slovaks, at 9,800,000. 

3. The Poles. Scattered over the whole of Galicia, intermixing 
there with the Ruthenes, but predominating mainly in the westerly 
part of it. They also live in Silesia, with settlements in Bukovina 
and Moravia. Austrian Poles number almost 5,000,000. All told, 
the Polish race in Austria, Germany, and Russia is computed by 
Niederle (1900) at 17,500,000; Polish statisticians make the total 
20,000,000. When the constitutional era first dawned in Austria, the 
Poles were put in full charge of Galicia, in appreciation of which 
concession they have always loyally supported the Austrian Govern- 
ment. In Galicia, the Poles are the aristocracy and the Ruthenes the 
peasant element. The affection of Vienna for the Poles, however, is 
not above suspicion; it is claimed that hatred of Russia, common to 
both the Poles and the Austrians, was more directly responsible for 
the alliance than any other single cause, though of course it is unde- 
niable that under Austrian rule the Poles fared better than either 
under the Russian or Prussian regimes. 

4. The Slovenes. Occupy the whole of Carniola, the southern 
part of Styria, the major section of Goritz and Gradiska, except a 
section in the southwestern part thereof, the outlying villages of Trieste, 
the northern end of Istria, which projects on the west into Italian ter- 



go BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

withstanding the honeyed assurances of consular 
officials, the way their sympathies incline. It 
should be borne in mind that this is a war of Slavs 
against Slavs, of Slavic Russia and Slavic Serbia 
against two-fifths Slavic Austria. Let us place 
ourselves in the position of the Bohemians. For 
decades they have worked for solidarity among the 
Slavs, so much so that their endeavors in this 
direction have earned for them the title of the 



ritory and eastward into Hungary. Niederle's estimate of the Slovenes 
in 1900 was 1,500,000. 

5. No Slavic race is more torn up territorially than the Serbo- 
Croatians. Although really one people by language and origin, they 
have divided themselves, or rather were subdivided by their political 
masters, into two national units. Their homelands include a large 
section of Istria and Dalmatia, together with the adjacent islands in 
the Adriatic, the whole of Croatia and Slavonia, a piece of southern 
Hungary, and all of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Besides this, there is, of 
course, the Serbian Kingdom and Montenegro. 

Niederle estimated the Serbo-Croatians in 1900 at 8,550,000. 

6. The Ruthenes (Little Russians). Overflow the Russian bounda- 
ries to Galicia, being predominant in east Galicia, strong in western 
and northern Bukovina, numerous in several counties in Hungary. 

Niederle computed the strength of the Ruthenes in Galicia, Hun- 
gary, and Bukovina in 1900 at 3,500,000. 

By religious affiliations the Slavs are divided as follows: To the Catholic 
group belong almost wholly the Bohemians, Poles, Slovenes, Croatians, 
and Slovaks (of the last named about seven-tenths). Protestantism finds 
favor among the Slovaks (24 per cent.), Bohemians (2.44 per cent.), 
and Poles living in Silesia (1.81 per cent.). The Orthodox faith 
is professed by the Ruthenes in Galicia, Hungary, and Bukovina, and 
the Serbians. A fraction of the Russians in Galicia and Hungary 
adheres to the Uniate Church, and there are believers in Mohamme- 
danism in Bosnia and Herzegovina. 

The old-fashioned Austrian diplomacy knew well the value of the 
principle " divide and rule " and tried it on its Slavs with success. 
There was a time when Bohemians in Moravia were taught by Aus- 
trian officials to believe that they were Moravians, not Bohemians. 
The difference between Bohemian and Moravian is as great as the 
difference between Bronx English and Brooklyn English, yet this fact 



A PLACE IN THE SUN 91 

Apostles of Pan-Slavism. Is it reasonable to sup- 
pose that they would suddenly turn traitors to 
one of the most cherished traditions of their race 
and shout enthusiastically for a war which, if 
successful for the two Kaisers, would mean 
their certain obliteration? If Germany should 
win, the eventual absorption by her of Austria 
would be probable, if not inevitable. The Pan- 
German sentiment in the two neighboring em- 
pires would become so overwhelmingly strong 
that nothing would stay its furor and the millions 
of Austrian Slavs would find themselves face to 
face with their doom. Plainly, Slavs have nothing 



did not discourage the grammarians in Vienna from setting up 
boundaries where none existed. Croatia, as pointed out elsewhere, 
is peopled by a nation calling itself alternately Croatians and Serbs. 
Possessing a common past, the same racial traditions, and speaking 
one language, the Serbo-Croatians are clearly one nation, divided only 
by different faiths. The Croatians use the Latin letters and adhere, 
almost to a man, to the Catholic faith, while the Serbs employ the 
Cyrillic alphabet and belong to the Orthodox Church. The busy gram- 
marians in Vienna and in Budapest did their utmost to keep the Serbo- 
Croatians apart, and even incited one against the other, by instilling 
the belief in them that two different religions really meant two differ- 
ent races. Galicia is inhabited by two distinct peoples, the Russians 
and the Poles. The name " Russian " sounded badly in Austria. It 
constantly reminded the Galician Russians that on the other side of 
the yellow-black boundary posts lived a great nation that spoke the 
same language and professed the same faith as they. Again the 
learned grammarians in Vienna went to work and by dint of hard 
study discovered that Austrian Russians were really not what they 
seemed to be and promptly they baptized them " Ruthenes." The 
ruse, of course, was to veil the nearness of the relationship of the 
" Ruthenes " to the Russians in Russia proper. In the same manner 
and with the same object in view the Slovaks of Hungary are en- 
couraged to believe that they are a separate race and not near rela- 
tives of the Bohemians. 



92 BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

to gain from the defeat of the Allies, but every- 
thing to lose from the victory of the Hapsburgs 
and the Hohenzollerns. They feel that nothing 
short of a decisive defeat of Austria will liberate 
them from the thraldom of German-Magyar domi- 
nation. If Austria collapses in this war the Bo- 
hemians will be among the first to profit thereby.* 
Is it really true that the Slavs are loyal? Is it 
not rather a loyalty wrung from them at the point 
of the bayonet? Besides, how can they protest 
against a war which was neither of their choosing 
nor of their making, when the military rule has 
made protests impossible? One must respect and 
even admire the French and the Germans when 
they declare that they are fighting for the exist- 
ence of the fatherland. What are the Austrian 



* For a student of Austrian conditions it is instructive to note 
how the war of the Balkan Allies against the Turk divided the sym- 
pathies of the people along racial lines. Save a fraction of the Poles 
in Galicia, the Slavs sided heartily and enthusiastically with the 
Allies. The Germans and the Magyars wished for the success of the 
Turks. When the Bulgars routed the Ottoman army at Kirk Killise, 
the Vienna press ill-concealed its chagrin, while Slavic journals re- 
joiced as if it had been their own victory. Imagine the dismay of 
such a staunch champion of Austrian public opinion as the Vienna 
" Neue Freie Presse," when the Serbs crushed the Turk at Kumanovo! 
For many reasons Serbia was for years looked upon as a kind of 
barometer of the hopes of the Austrian Slavs. A clever Bohemian 
journalist made the interesting prediction some time before the Balkan 
War that relief from Austrian thraldom may be looked for, not from 
Russia, as many dreamers believed, but from the small Slavic states 
in the Balkans. If these were victorious, prophesied this newspaper 
writer, the Slavs in the Hapsburg Monarchy were sure to gain mor- 
ally from the victory. Official public opinion frowned on the war 
relief work among Austrian Slavs in aid of the Balkan Allies. 



A PLACE IN THE SUN 93 

Slavs fighting for? To them, or rather to the 
majority of them, Austrian fatherland conveys 
but an abstraction, for correctly speaking, Austria 
is a government and not a fatherland in the sense 
that a German or a Frenchman regards the country 
of his birth. Austria may possibly be a father- 
land to the inhabitants of the Archduchies of 
Lower and Upper Austria, but not to a Bohemian, a 
Magyar, or a Pole — certainly no more than England 
is the fatherland of an Irishman. By allegiance 
a Bohemian is an Austrian subject, ethnically 
he belongs to the country of his birth — Bohemia. 
While the national anthem "Kde domov muj " 
(Where is my Home?) stirs deeply the emotions 
of a Bohemian, the singing of the Austrian hymn 
" Gott erhalte " leaves him cold and indifferent. 

VIENNA, THE CAPITAL 

Vienna loves to pose as the beacon-light of the 
empire somewhat as Paris, the recognized centre of 
everything French, or Berlin, the pivotal city of 
Germany. Yet Vienna forgets that it lacks all of 
the historical, geographical, economic essentials 
of Paris and, for that matter, of Berlin. What 
is Vienna ? The residence of the sovereign and the 
seat of the government and the capital — not of the 
empire, mind you, but of the Archduchy of Lower 
Austria. The capital of Hungary is Budapest; the 



94« BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

centre of attraction of the Poles is Cracow; the 
heart of the Bohemians is Prague. What has been 
the attitude of Vienna toward the non-German peo- 
ples and their national needs ? The good-natured 
Viennese has for decades seen the Slavs caricatured 
on the stage, or in the humorous journals, as hope- 
less simpletons, while the Bohemian Wenzel was 
chosen by common consent as the quintessence of 
stupidity. ' 

Several years ago a Bohemian Bank purchased 
palatial quarters on a leading thoroughfare, but 
it had to cover with cloth a Bohemian sign on the 
building until the municipality gave its consent 
thereto. A few years ago a company of actors, 
attached to the National Theatre at Prague, ar- 
ranged to give in Vienna representative plays. 
Anti-Bohemian demonstrations, ending in riots, 
were the result. 

Vienna, the capital of an empire that is inhabited 
by a dozen different races, and which counts among 
its inhabitants upward of 300,000 Bohemians, ob- 
jected to a business sign in Bohemian, because it 
might mar the beauty of its looks as a German city ! 
A few years ago the municipality ordered the clos- 
ing of the Komensky Bohemian elementary school, 
ostensibly because it failed to comply with build- 
ing and health ordinances. The real reason, how- 
ever, was known to be political and racial antip- 



A PLACE IN THE SUN 95 

athy. Is it any wonder, then, that the sentiment 
" Away from Vienna " is strong and that it 
grows stronger every year among non-Germans? 
" Vienna has always been to us," remarked a noted 
Bohemian writer, "a cruel, unforgiving step- 
mother." 

THE PROBLEM 

On the surface the Austrian problem appears 
to be quite complicated, yet with the assistance of 
a few facts and figures much that is puzzling to 
casual observers becomes intelligible, if not per- 
fectly clear. 

Like most industrial countries, Austria is 
plagued with issues which follow in the wake of 
modernism — whatever that term may imply. 
Modernism there pounds with ever-increasing vio- 
lence at the doors of the palaces of the opulent 
captains of industry. The small farmer is land- 
hungry. Industrialism has everywhere created 
new sources of wealth, yet with every factory 
erected or a mine opened the socialists have added 
so much to their disaffected ranks. A bitter war 
is being waged in certain sections of the monarchy 
between the clericals and the modernists, for it 
must not be forgotten that Austria is still a faith- 
ful daughter of Rome. If there are those who 
favor the " Los von Rom "— " Away from Rome " 



96 BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

— movement, there are others who firmly believe 
that a steadfast loyalty to a faith different from 
that professed by the Prussian neighbor, really con- 
stitutes one of the most effective barriers against 
the ever-threatening absorption of Austria by 
Prussia. 

Most important of all the problems, however, 
which confront Austria is that of nationalism. 
Nationalism was unknown to Austria in the days 
of Napoleon. Prior to 1848 Hapsburgs knew and 
recognized Austrian-Germans only. After that 
revolutionary year they were compelled to take 
notice, unwillingly enough, we may be sure, of 
other races. Bohemians, Magyars, Croatians, and 
others forced themselves to the front ; and, resent- 
ing the broad and ethnically meaningless term 
" Austrian," demanded to be called by their proper 
racial names. 

The voice that extolled racial patriotism had 
first been heard across the Austrian frontier from 
Frankfort, Germany, in 1848, when a parliament 
that had been summoned to that city called on 
Germans to unite. Promptly the Slavs took up the 
idea of unity and as a retaliatory measure sum- 
moned a Pan-Slavic Congress to meet in Prague. 
It was on the occasion of the Prague Congress 
that Francis Palacky addressed his famous let- 
ter to the Frank fortists, explaining why the Bohe- 



A PLACE IN THE SUN 97 

mians and other Slavs were opposed to the in- 
corporation of Austria in the future Germany. 
" The aim which you propose to yourselves," wrote 
Palacky, among other things, to Frankfort, " is 
the substitution of a federation of peoples for the 
old federation of princes, to unite the German 
nation in a real union, to strengthen the sentiment 
of German nationality, to secure the greatness of 
Germans without and within. I honor your resolve 
and the motives by which you are impelled, but at 
the same time I cannot share in your work. I am 
not a German, or at least I do not feel as if I were 
one. Assuredly you cannot wish that I should 
join you merely as a supernumerary with neither 
opinion nor will of my own. I am a Bohemian of 
Slavic origin, and all I possess and command I 
place wholly and forever at the service of my 
own country. It is true that my nation is 
small, but from the very beginning it has possessed 
its own historical individuality. Its princes on 
occasions have acted in common with German 
princes, but the people have never regarded them- 
selves as Germans, nor have others, during all 
these centuries, included them amongst them." 

It, therefore, sounds very much like irony to 
hear Germans from the Fatherland censuring the 
Austrian Government for allowing the national 
movement among its Slavs to spread as it did. 



98 BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

What the Austrian nations really did was to follow 
the advice of their Germanic tutors and awaken 
racially. 

The population of Austria in 1910 was 28,571,- 
934. Of this number the Slavs constituted 60.65 
percentage, the Germans 35.58. It is in these 
figures that we must seek — and will find — ^the real 
problem of the country. " Austria," once declared 
a noted statesman in the Austrian Parliament, 
" should be a German state in language and edu- 
cation. German should be spoken by all persons 
and serve as a political bond to all races and na- 
tionalities. All the citizens, whatever may be their 
mother tongue, Bohemians, Slovaks, Poles, Ru- 
thenes, Slovenes, Rumuns, and Italians, should 
submit to the baptism of the German school, if 
they desire to participate in the public affairs of 
the state." Someone answering von Kaiserfeld, 
for that was the name of the distinguished states- 
man, " You desire to Germanize the empire ; you 
are not Austrians, you are Germans," von Kaiser- 
feld replied angrily, " There are no Austrians in 
Austria, only Germans." Von Kaiserfeld was not 
the only statesman who believed that Austria 
should be a German state. That is the obsession 
practically of every German in the country, from 
the emperor down to the meanest postman. Yet 
Austria is to-day further from the realization of 



A PLACE IN THE SUN 99 

this dream than it ever was. The feeling of 
nationalism has grown too strong among the non- 
Germans to be suppressed. And this nationalism 
demands that people shall be allowed to live thei. 
individual lives, to cultivate their language and 
racial ideals, and to pursue both without the in- 
terference of any other people. 

Much of the difficulty in the past has been di- 
rectly due to the fact that the 35 per cent, not only 
thought and acted for themselves, but they also 
insisted on doing the thinking for the 60 per cent., 
regardless of the latter's feelings. The result was 
jealousy, discord, opposition. Even the Great War 
which has caused Austria to rock like a rudderless 
ship, was engineered and premeditated by the 35 
per cent., in face of the bitter, though of course 
futile, opposition of the 60 per cent. As a result, 
there is only 30 per cent, of enthusiasm and effi- 
ciency; and in juxtaposition, 60 per cent, in dis- 
aster, defeats, and discouragements. 

The Hapsburgs have never learned, it seems, 
how to rule their many nationalities successfully. 
There are two races in Canada, the English and 
the French. If the Canadian Government had 
treated its citizens of French origin in the same 
rough-shod manner as Vienna has treated the Bo- 
hemians, or Budapest the Slovaks, ^Serbs, or 
Rumuns, she would have made rebels of every one 



100 BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

of them, instead of loyal citizens. The Swiss 
Republic is the home of three races, French, Ger- 
man, and ItaHan, and yet we hear of no racial 
friction among them. And when and where did 
the national, state, or city government in the United 
States interfere when this or that people of for- 
eign origin desired to build a school or establish a 
clubhouse ? 

Years ago T. G. Masaryk, a prominent Bohe- 
mian deputy, delivered a scathing denunciation 
in parliament, in which he took the government 
to task for its anti-Slavic policy. " Extirpate, 
Germanize, that is and has been the favorite policy 
of the government for decades," said Masaryk. 
" Extirpate whom ? The Slavs, of course, and first 
among them the Bohemians. A nation as vigorous 
and virile as our Bohemian nation is bound, if 
persecuted, to seek and find new outlets for its 
surplus energy. And if, while this process is 
going on, we succeed in reclaiming some of the 
ground that had been wrested from our fore- 
fathers, it is but a law of compensation and the 
Germans should not claim that we are encroaching 
on their domain, which they claim belongs to them. 
We shall never rest content if we are only tolerated 
in Austria; we demand the right to be treated as 
equals with the rest of the citizens of the state 
and we insist on being permitted to work out our 



A PLACE IN THE SUN 101 

destiny as Bohemians without restrictions or Hmi- 
tations. We entertain no hatred toward the 
Germans. We are distrustful, not so much of Ger- 
many, as of Prussia. Recently a speaker in this 
parHament has declared that the Germans were 
not antagonistic to the Slavs, and that, therefore, 
they could not be hostile to the Bohemians. This, 
I regret to say, is untrue. It is a matter of com- 
mon knowledge that not only they, but the govern- 
ment as well, are in opposition to us. I shall not 
repeat what Mr, Dumreicher has lately said about 
the Germanization of the Slovenes and of the Bo- 
hemians ; permit me to allude to a pamphlet which 
came out some time ago and which is causing a 
great deal of comment, ' On the right and the duty 
of the Germanization of the Bohemians and the 
Slovenes,' by Mathias Ratkovsky. Yes, gentlemen, 
it will be a sin if the Bohemians and Slovenes are 
not Germanized, is the opinion of Mr. Ratkovsky of 
the Vienna Theresianum. The government should 
use force to attain this object, if necessary. Equal- 
ity of languages, what nonsense, argues Mr. Rat- 
kovsky ! The government owes it to the people to 
make Bohemia German. Extirpate! Remember, 
gentlemen, Ratkovsky is not an isolated case ; this 
agitation is being conducted systematically both in 
Austria and in Germany. F. Loher, a Bavarian 
historian, who studied conditions in Austria- 



lOS BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

Hungary in the seventies, declared that there was 
only one conclusion possible : to make Germans of 
Bohemians and Magyars. This same idea was 
advanced by Professor Walcker of the University 
of Leipzig. Yet, gentlemen, I should not attribute 
so great a weight to the opinions here cited were 
it not for the circumstance that bigger men in Ger- 
many were behind this scheme. One can often 
hear mentioned the name of Lagarde in this con- 
nection and you, gentlemen of the German na- 
tional party, know Lagarde's name full well. 
What has this great thinker taught the German 
youth for decades ? ' Austria must be regarded in 
the light of a colony of Germany. Apart from this 
Austria has no claim to a separate existence. Aus- 
tria is confronted with one task only and that 
task is to Germanize all its Slavs.' To the South 
Slavs Lagarde gave pardon. All the other people 
of the Danube Monarchy, including the Magyars, 
were obstacles in Germany's way and the sooner 
they were extirpated the better for Germany, the 
better for themselves. Slavs, according to La- 
garde, resembled a commercial enterprise which 
was working with an insufficient capital. And just 
as there could be no Reuss-Schleiz-Greiz-Loben- 
stein policy, so there could not exist a state called 
Wenzelland (an opprobrious term given to Bohemia 
by Germans and meaning much the same as Pat- 



A PLACE IN THE SUN 103 

rickland as applied to Ireland). Istria, contended 
Lagarde, should be German to form an outlet for 
German commerce to the Adriatic Sea and to the 
African coast, Jablunkov (a town in Austrian 
Silesia situated on a direct route to Hungary) 
should hear nothing but German, and from there 
let the wave roll southwardly, submerging the 
wretched little states and people that now bar the 
way thither. 'No empire, save Germany, is capable 
of upholding peace in Central Europe, a Germany, 
which should reach out from the Ems to the delta 
of the Danube, from Memel to Trieste, from 
Metz to the river Bug. Only such a Germany 
could be self-sustaining, only such a Germany, 
with its huge standing army, would be powerful 
enough to defeat both France and Russia. Bo- 
hemians and all the other small races must not be 
coddled by us. On the contrary, they are our 
enemies, and we should deal with them as such. 
Austria cannot be preserved except as a Germanic 
Empire.' Gentlemen, note what is going on in 
Germany at the present time and you cannot but 
see that this plan to unite Austria with Germany, 
to Germanize Austria, has become a recognized 
policy in both of these monarchies. I am not quot- 
ing from newspaper clippings. I could refer you 
to the books of several prominent writers in sup- 
port of this contention. Can you blame us then 



104 BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

that we are on guard and that we watch with 
jealous look what is going on both in Germany 
and among our Austrian Germans? Do not tell 
us that we should not take seriously theories of 
professors lecturing at Gottingen, Miinich, and so 
forth. No, these theories so-called are assuming 
practical forms. Behold, for instance, the teach- 
ing of a philosopher like Edward Hartmann. A 
few years ago this noted scholar defined the pro- 
gram of Germany very clearly: Ausrotten! (ex- 
tirpate). Ausrotten whom? The Poles, of 
course, and with them all those who are not of 
German blood. You cannot convince us that this 
is a theory advanced by professorial dreamers 
only; no, it is a theory which the chancellor of 
iron and blood (Bismarck) put to practice with 
the backing and money of the Prussian Govern- 
ment in the case of the Poles in Posen. I allude 
to this not as an isolated case, but as part of a 
well-recognized system that is at work through- 
out our monarchy and that not alone threatens to 
undermine its very existence as a state, but which 
aims a death-blow at our nation, just as it menaces 
the life of the Poles, of the Slovenes, and of all 
the Slavs." 

The constitution of 1867 proclaimed the equality 
of languages in schools, courts, and in administra- 
tion of public affairs. However, the operation of 



A PLACE IN THE SUN 105 

this constitutional guarantee is unique and its in- 
terpretation a legal puzzle. For example, in 
Carinthia there are 30,000 Germans and 500,000 
Slovenes; the latter are autochthons, yet the Ger- 
mans there demand equality but they vehemently 
deny equality to the Slovene minority in Styria. 
In the same breath, they insist that German schools 
be maintained in Italian Tyrol, while they urge 
the authorities to close Italian schools in northern 
Tyrol. In Prague the courts try cases in either 
Bohemian or German, but should a Bohemian come 
into contact with the courts in Vienna, the capital 
of the empire, the law forgets equality and treats 
him there as a foreigner who must plead his case in 
German only. In Prague there are numerous and 
palatial German schools maintained by the state 
or the municipality, as the case may be; but in 
Vienna Bohemians, though numbering not less 
than 300,000 (in Prague Germans are 17,000 
strong) , have not one public school and the school 
authorities at the capital have fought for years in 
the courts every attempt of the Bohemians in that 
direction. A very striking illustration of the chaos 
in this respect is found in Bohemia. There, in the 
so-called German-Bohemia, Germans insist that 
their language shall be paramount and exclusive in 
the judiciary, schools, and administration. Hav- 
ing long enjoyed ascendency they will not content 



106 BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

themselves with equality; yet in the rest of the 
country, in the mixed and in the pure Bohemian 
districts, they demand that both tongues shall have 
equal rights. By stamping their tongues as 
*' minderwertig," inferior, the government pro- 
vokes to opposition the non-German element. 

Observe how the idea of equality works out in 
practice the matter of the distribution of schools. 
For 9,950,266 Germans Austria maintains 5 uni- 
versities (at Vienna, Prague, Graz, Innsbruck, 
Czernovitz), and for 6,435,983 Bohemians one 
university at Prague. And this one university the 
Bohemians were able to get in 1882 only after a 
great deal of political haggling and bargaining. 
Opponents of the Bohemian seat of learning pre- 
dicted that it would soon fail for lack of profes- 
sors and of students. Yet, contrary to their ex- 
pectation, when the Prague school was divided in 
1882 into two parts, Bohemian and German, 1,055 
students matriculated the first year in the Bohe- 
main section as against 1,695 Germans. Eventu- 
ally the Bohemian university — ^by the way, one of 
the oldest universities in Central Europe, having 
been founded by Emperor Charles IV. in 1348 — 
far outstripped its old partner in point of attend- 
ance. At present the number of students in the 
Bohemian faculties is 4,713; in the German 2,282. 
Of late years a demand has been made for a sec- 



A PLACE IN THE SUN 107 

ond university to be located at Brno (Briinn), the 
capital of Moravia. The University of Prague is 
scandalously overcrowded and students from the 
sister state of Moravia are compelled, in conse- 
quence, to go to Vienna in search of education, 
where, under Teutonic influences, many are 
estranged from their nation. Numerous petitions 
have been addressed to the government on the 
subject of a second university, but to no purpose. 
In the matter of secondary schools (gymnasia and 
real schools) the discrimination against non-Ger- 
mans is very striking. For 4,241,918 Bohemians 
in Bohemia the government maintains 39 schools 
of this type for secondary education, and they are 
unable to get more, while 2,467,724 Germans 
boast 34 of these schools. In Moravia the dis- 
proportion is still greater and in Silesia it is 
relatively worse than in Moravia. The condition 
of the Bohemian elementary schools in the mixed 
districts near the border is most deplorable. It 
was the blind and unreasoning hostility of the au- 
thorities in the German-Bohemian districts against 
Bohemian schools which led the patriots, in 1880, 
to found a school society called the Ustfedni 
Matice Skolska. This vernacular school society 
had spent, up to 19 12, a total of more than 
$3,000,000 in the establishment and support of 
such schools in districts inhabited by both races. 



108 BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

Every cent of this money has been donated by the 
Bohemian people in order to give their children an 
education in the mother tongue. 

THE ORIGIN OF AUSTRIA 

" Austria as a great power," said Rieger,* in 
a speech delivered in parliament in 1861, " dates 
back only to the days when the Bohemian Crown 
and the Hungarian Crown united with Austria. 
We Bohemians raised it to the dignity of a 
state of the first magnitude when, by a free elec- 
tion, our diet summoned, on October 23, 1526,! 
Ferdinand I. to the sovereign throne of our king- 
dom. Our action was followed on November 
26th of that year by the Hungarians, who placed 
the crown of their country on the head of this 
Hapsburg. From that time on Austria, composed 
of three states in one, started on its career of a 
world power. The three units were the basis, the 
origin, the rise of the Austrian Empire. All else is 
really the result of accident. Eastern Galicia has 

* Francis L. Rieger (1818-1903), a lawyer, writer, economist, and 
statesman, was, despite his German name, an uncompromising patriot 
who had spent his whole life in the service of his nation. Modern 
Bohemia without Rieger is unthinkable. His name is written large 
on every page of his country's history. As a leader of the Old Bo- 
hemian party he naturally played a prominent role in the fight for 
the historical rehabilitation of the Bohemian Kingdom. Having mar- 
ried the daughter of Francis Palacky, the " Father of the Nation," 
he was nicknamed by his political adversaries, " Son-in-law of the 
Nation." 

t Ferdinand, however, took his oath of office January 30, 1527. 



A PLACE IN THE SUN 109 

belonged to Austria only since 1772, Bukovina 
since 1777, Western Galicia since 1795, Venice and 
Dalmatia since 1797, Southern Tyrol (Trient and 
Brixen) since 1801, Salzburg and other smaller 
lands since 1814, while Cracow is part of Austria 
only since 1846. All these possessions have not 
made Austria a great power, for even without 
them it would still be one; however, an Austrian 
Empire is unthinkable and Austria as a great 
power is inconceivable without one of the three 
crowns — that of Austria, Bohemia, or Hungary." 

AUSTRIA'S FUTURE DARK 

What is Austria? A land that has a German 
head and a Slavonic body, in which minorities 
rule and majorities are made to obey, the home- 
land of a dozen races, every one of which is dis- 
satisfied or jealous of some other race. 

There was a time when Austria had a mission to 
perform. That mission was to serve as the ad- 
vance guard of Germandom and as a Catholic 
power. The first came to an end at Sedan when 
the Prussians assumed leadership among Germans ; 
the second terminated when Prussia gave up its 
Kulturkampf against Rome. Now Austria is a 
country without a mission, unless it be a mission 
to thwart the legitimate aspirations of the Slavic 
races to national freedom. 



110 BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

For Austria to pursue further its policy of Teu- 
tonism is madness. If the monarchy wishes to 
live it must be neither German, for there is no 
room in Europe for two Germanic Empires side 
by side, nor wholly Slavonic, like Russia. Her 
manifest destiny is, or rather has been, to form a 
bridge between Germany and Russia, between the 
Slavs and Teutons, between the west and the east. 
For Germany to go to war to fight the Slavic peril 
is conceivable, even justifiable; but for Austria, 
more than 60 per cent. Slavonic, to draw her 
sword to combat Slavism sounds very much like 
the familiar story attributed by Plutarch to 
Menenius Agrippa, according to which various 
members of one's body determined to down the 
stomach as the source of all their troubles. To 
fight the Slavs Austria must fight herself. 

Plainly the destinies of Austria and Germany 
are as unlike as are divergent their ambitions. Ger- 
many aspired to be a world power, a Weltmacht, 
and in pursuance of this dream she began to build 
up a colonial empire. Austria possesses no colo- 
nies. The plan of her statesmen (Aehrenthal) 
has been to establish a predominating Austrian 
influence in the Balkans, where Germany's inter- 
ests, to quote the well-known words of Bismarck, 
were not worth the bones of one Pomeranian 
grenadier. Germany is a homogeneous country 



A PLACE IN THE SUN 111 

or nearly so; Austria, on the contrary, is the most 
heterogeneous empire in Central Europe, 

Quite naturally the question suggests itself: 
what would arise on the splendid ruins on the 
Danube should the proverbial ill-luck overtake the 
Hapsburgs in the present war ? With Galicia and 
Bukovina lost to Russia, with Transylvania an- 
nexed to Rumania, with Trentino and Trieste 
restored to Italy, and Bosnia and Herzegovina in- 
corporated in Greater Serbia — provided the parti- 
tion went no further — what would be left of the 
Hapsburg inheritance ? Instead of a Greater Aus- 
tria, that should have included conquered Serbia, 
it is not improbable that the Hapsburgs will re- 
turn home from the Great War with a Small 
Austria — an Austria as it began in 1527, when the 
Austrians, Bohemians, and Hungarians formed a 
confederacy and elected a Hapsburg as their ruler. 

Rieger, a Bohemian statesman, once declared 
in the Vienna Parliament, that Austria will only 
live as long as the Slavs wish her to live and no 
longer. Rieger's famous utterance has acquired a 
new meaning in view of the passing events in the 
Hapsburg Empire. 

Thomas Capek. 

References: The writer of this article is largely 
indebted for much of the material to Professor 
Ernest Denis' most excellent work. La Boheme 
depuis La Montagne-Blanche (lately translated 



112 BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

from the French into Bohemian). Among others 
he has consulted the following Bohemian works: 
Our Re-birth, Review of Bohemian National Life 
Within the Last Half Century, by Jakub Maly; 
Slavdom, Pictures of Its Past and Present. (This 
is a standard work containing isolated articles by 
a number of representative authors.) History of 
Our Times, by Dr. Jan Kristufek; Political History 
of the Bohemian Nation from the Year 1861 to 
the Ascension of the Badeni Ministry in 1891, by 
Adolf Srb ; Political Ideas of Francis Palacky; Po- 
litical Utterances and Principles of Francis L. 
Rieger; A Great Bohemian: The Life, Work and 
Meaning of Francis Palacky, the Father of the Na- 
tion, by Vacslav fteznicek; Karel Havlicek: Aims 
and Hopes of Political Awakening, by T. G. 
Masaryk. 



II 

THE SLOVAKS OF HUNGARY 

THE Slovaks, a branch of the Slavic family, 
numbering between 2,000,000 and 3,000,- 
000 people, and kinsmen of the Bohemians, 
inhabit the northwestern provinces of Hungary. 
There is not uniform agreement among Slovak 
scholars with reference to the ethnic affinity of this 
people with the Bohemians. Are the Slovaks a 
direct offshoot of the Bohemians or a separate 
branch of the Slavic family? Ethnologists find 
convincing arguments for and against both 
theories. Bohemians, as may be surmised, take 
the ground that they and the Slovaks are one — 
one in language and one in racial traditions — and 
that nothing divides them except political bound- 
aries, — the Slovaks being subject to the rule of 
Hungary, Bohemians owing allegiance to Austria. 
Samo Czambel, a learned Slovak, published a 
book recently on the grammatical peculiarities of 
his mother tongue in which, contrary to the almost 
universal opinion of philologists that Slovak is but 
an older form of Bohemian, he contends that the 

113 



114 BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

old grouping of Slovak jointly with Bohemian is 
wrong ; and that the language should be treated as 
an independent Slavic idiom, precisely in the same 
way as Polish, Russian, etc. But, though gram- 
marians may disagree about this or that Slovak 
or Bohemian root or termination of a verb; though 
they may fancy they see a difference where prob- 
ably none exists, the people themselves have no 
quarrels to pick, no disputes to adjust. On the 
contrary, they have always been good neighbors * 
and loyal friends. As for real differences of 
speech, these are so slight that a Slovak will under- 
stand a Bohemian as readily as an Englishman 
from Yorkshire will his cousin, the Yankee. One 
is reminded of the closeness of the two languages 
when one recalls that Slovaks of the Protestant 
faith read at their church services from the Bo- 
hemian Bible. Recently a meeting of representa- 
tive Bohemians and Slovaks f in New York 
passed a resolution, in which occurs this significant 
passage : " Nothing now separates us, except that 
we owe political allegiance to two different states, 
one to Austria, the other to Hungary. Remove 
that barrier, and it will be seen that the Bohe- 



* " The Slovaks and Their Language " (Slovdci a ich Rec), by Dr. 
Samo Czambel, Budapest, 1903. 

t Among the Slovak spokesmen at this meeting was Editor Milan 
Getting, of New York. At a subsequent conference was present 
Albert Mamatey, President of the National Slovak Society. 



THE SLOVAKS OF HUNGARY 115 

mians and Slovaks are one in language, one in 
blood, one in national faith, indissoluble and in- 
divisible." 

According to the census of 19 lo, a census, by 
the way, notoriously unreliable, Slovaks number 
1,967,970. If an enumeration were taken free 
of intrigue and coercion, the actual number of 
Slovaks, it is asserted, would be nearer 2,5oo,ocx); 
and, were we to include as Slovaks the opportunists 
who everywhere go with the ruling element, and 
further, were we to add those who are compelled, 
for various reasons, to conceal their nationality, 
the actual number would not be far from 3,000,000. 
Outside of Slovakland Slovaks are scattered 
throughout Hungary except in Transylvania. 
There are few districts in Hungary in which they 
do not live. The various settlements in the in- 
terior of the country are in part ramifications of 
Slovakland proper, which formerly extended fur- 
ther south into Hungary than at present and in 
part colonies, the origin of which dates back to 
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 

When did the Slovaks come to Hungary ? Prob- 
ably the question could best be answered by saying 
that they had always lived there. Certain pseudo- 
historians wish to make it appear that the Slovaks 
are descendants of immigrants from Bohemia who 
fled to Hungary to escape religious and political 



116 BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

persecution. The truth is, however, that their 
ancestors occupied the Carpathian highlands from 
the dawn of history. The Slovaks of Hungary 
are not immigrants, and no authoritative historian 
has successfully disputed their claim to priority as 
one of the earliest inhabitants of the Kingdom of 
St. Stephen. 

Down to the middle of the last century no one 
of the languages spoken by the different racial 
elements in Hungary acquired predominance. For 
the purposes of every-day life each race was free 
to use its mother tongue. During the mediaeval 
period Latin was the medium of communication 
among the cultured classes. Latin was gradually 
superseded by the German language and the Slo- 
vaks, though grieved at the wanton suppression of 
their vernacular, did not feel that their national 
existence had been threatened by the innovation. 
But when, in 1867, Austria concluded with Hun- 
gary the Act of Settlement, whereby the dual 
system of government was introduced, and the 
Magyars secured for themselves ascendency over 
all the other races in the kingdom, the danger be- 
came acute, and has been growing steadily since, 
until now the Slovaks are menaced by denational- 
ization. True, the Law of Nationalities was pro- 
mulgated soon after the Act of Settlement, osten- 
sibly for the protection of non-Magyars; but this 



THE SLOVAKS OF HUNGARY 117 

law, in the words of Plutarch, " is like a spider 
web and would catch the weak and the poor ; but 
may easily be broken by the mighty rich." Bitter 
experience has shown that under the Law of 
Nationalities, the very acts which the law was 
designed to prevent or regulate, have been per- 
petrated with impunity, either by omission or com- 
mission. 

Students of Slovak nationality have been ex- 
pelled by school authorities from seminaries and 
secondary schools for Pan-Slavic propaganda. 
Pan-Slavism in the case of these unfortunate 
youths consists in the reading, recitation, or cir- 
culation of literature in one of the Slavic tongues. 
Journalists are prosecuted or jailed for alleged 
seditious articles against the Hungarian State; 
newspapers are mulcted in ruinous fines, in many 
cases tantamount to their suppression. In coun- 
tries enjoying the blessing of freedom of speech 
and press, de facto and not only de jure, the ar- 
ticles which Hungarian prosecuting attorneys con- 
strue as seditious, would be regarded as an honest 
and fearless criticism of the acts of government. 
There are few Slovak journalists who have not 
served terms in jail or whose newspapers have not 
been fined. 

To plead one's case in the courts in the Slovak 
language, notwithstanding the express provisions 



118 BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

of the Law of Nationalities permitting this pro- 
cedure, would be prejudicial to the litigant's case 
in the lower courts and impossible in the higher 
courts. 

A patriotic Slovak may not hold a government 
position of any trust or importance. One aspir- 
ing to an office in any way connected with the 
government, directly or indirectly, must of neces- 
sity renounce his nationality — or, in the alterna- 
tive, conceal his true inward feelings, both before 
his superiors and before his friends. 

Apparently with the object of making the world 
believe that Slovakland has always been Magyar, 
the Hungarian Government is abolishing the an- 
cient Slavic nomenclature of villages and towns, 
replacing it with Magyar names, and this crusade 
is undertaken in districts where from times im- 
memorial no other speech had been heard but 
Slovak.* 

A visiting Hungarian statesman boasted before 
an American audience in New York City that the 
laws of Hungary were as broad and liberal as 
those in the United States. If such were the case, 
why are not Slovaks permitted to establish schools 
and organize themselves into societies as freely as 

* The very words "Slovak," " Slovakland," " Slovak nation " are 
tabooed in Hungary, and school books containing them prohibited. 
Hungarian oiHcialdom refers to Slovakland as the Hungarian High- 
lands. 



THE SLOVAKS OF HUNGARY 119 

irx the United States? In the early seventies of 
the last century the government closed all the 
Slovak secondary schools (gymnasia) on the pre- 
text that they fostered among the pupils and 
professors Pan-Slavic propaganda. Since that 
time, and despite the plain language of the Law of 
Nationalities, assuring to every race education in 
its native tongue, Slovaks have been unable to 
obtain from the authorities consent to the reopen- 
ing of even one higher school. Think of a nation 
of two millions and a half, living in the heart of 
Europe, not having one higher school for the edu- 
cation of its youth ! In 1875 the government con- 
fiscated the funds of an educational institution, 
and with the money undertook to publish at Buda- 
pest " a patriotic Hungarian journal." At the 
University of Budapest, the Slovak idiom is studi- 
ously ignored by the instructors, though the 
Slovaks are heavy taxpayers, and even a biased 
census concedes 10 per cent. Slovak population in 
the country. Slovak elementary schools are fast 
disappearing ; those that still remain in Slovakland 
are either mixed, that is Slovak-Magyar, or pure 
Magyar. Under the provision of the Apponyi 
Law, Magyar is the only recognized language of 
instruction in elementary schools in Hungary 
which are attended by twenty or more Magyar 
children. Since the normal schools are all Magyar, 



120 BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

it is obvious that the future teachers of Slovak 
children will have no means, except by private 
study, to learn the language of their little charges. 

Neither Vienna nor Budapest will listen to their 
appeal for justice. The Lord is too high and the 
Emperor-King too far away to hear and see the 
Slovaks. The Rumuns in Transylvania may hope 
for succor from their motherland, Rumania ; Ital- 
ians in the unredeemed provinces may look for- 
ward to the time when Italy will liberate them 
from Austrian misrule; even the Serbs in South- 
ern Hungary find new courage in resisting oppres- 
sion by reason of their nearness to their brothers 
in the Serbian Kingdom. Whence shall Slovaks 
look for sympathy and help? Their nearest kins- 
men, the Bohemians, who, of all the nations, best 
understand them, are themselves held down by an 
alien oppressor and unable to give them other than 
moral aid. 

" In comparison with the Government of Mag- 
yarland the Government of Austria is a model of 
tolerance." * 

This is the opinion of an Englishman who 
knows conditions in Hungary well. Exterminate 
the race, suppress its language, obliterate every 
evidence of its existence : that is now and has been 

* London Times, January 20, 1915. 



THE SLOVAKS OF HUNGARY 121 

for decades the policy of the Hungarian Govern- 
ment toward the Slovaks, 

Some time ago the American Slovaks formu- 
lated a demand for autonomy in a memorandum 
which they sent to influential friends and to those 
whom they hope to win as friends. The memo- 
randum '* voices the sentiment and national aspira- 
tions, not only of Slovaks living in the United 
States, but also interprets the mind and the will 
of their brothers, inhabiting, since times im- 
memorial, the ancestral homelands of the race." 
That the American Slovaks took the initiative in 
issuing the memorandum is not hard to under- 
stand. " The Slovaks at home are not permitted to 
approach their king with grievances, the last depu- 
tation to him having been denied admittance. 
Slovaks, therefore, are made to feel that they have 
no king, only a government — a government, how- 
ever, that knows no mercy, that feels no remorse, 
that offers no hope, that fears no punishment. If 
Slovaks are resolved to speak at all, if they wish 
the world at large to know the measure of their 
wrongs, under existing conditions, they can only 
appeal through the medium of their compatriots 
in the United States." 

Of the Magyars as a nation the Slovaks do not 
complain. It is the Hungarian Government which 
they accuse of oppression. 



12a BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

When the time approaches to re-draw the map 
of Austria-Hungary, the Slovaks will ask to be 
freed from the Hungarian yoke. And if they 
cannot have a government of their own, their sec- 
ond choice is to co-operate with the Bohemians 
toward the establishment of a confederacy that 
shall include the autonomous states of Bohemia, 
Moravia, Silesia, and Slovakland. Thus to the 
present ethnical unity of Slovaks and Bohemians 
another bond would be added, that of political 
unity. 

Thomas Capek. 

References : The Slovaks of Hungary, The Knick- 
erbocker Press, New York, 1906, by Thomas 
Capek; Racial Problems in Hungary, Archibald 
Constable & Co., Ltd., London, 1908, by Scotus 
Viator. Die UnterdrUckung der Slovaken durch die 
Magyar en, Prague, 1903. 



Ill 

WHY BOHEMIA DESERVES FREEDOM 

By Professor B, Simek of the State Univer- 
sity OF Iowa * 

IN the present European crisis several nations 
are hoping for a betterment of their political 
fortunes. Among these not the least hopeful 
are the Bohemians in the historic Kingdom of 
Bohemia, now annexed to the Austrian Empire. 

Many who are unfamiliar with the situation will 
probably ask : Why should the Bohemians seek in- 
dependence? Are they not more secure as a part 
of a large empire? It is in anticipation of, and 
in response to such questions that the following 
facts are presented. 

Bohemia has not received just treatment at the 
hands of the Austrian Government. Her national 
spirit has been offended or ignored, her people 
have been oppressed, her schools are not ade- 
quately maintained, and the scant support which 
they now receive has been wrung from the gov- 

* The writer is a representative type o£ the sturdy settler of Bo- 
hemian ancestry who helped to build up the Northwest. He sojourned 
in the birthland of his parents when the war broke out. 

123 



1^4 BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

ernment only by tremendous effort, and in times 
of great political stress. Even now the people are 
compelled to maintain schools in some parts of the 
kingdom by voluntary contributions. The govern- 
ment has done nothing for Bohemia either politi- 
cally, intellectually, or industrially, excepting under 
compulsion. Therefore there is no reason for a 
grateful desire to perpetuate the present relation. 
Bohemia has heretofore been loyal to Austria only 
because she faced a greater danger from German 
absorption. 

The grounds on which the Bohemians ask the 
right to shape their own destinies as a nation are 
chiefly the following : 

I. The historic right. — The House of Hapsburg 
was called to the throne of Bohemia by voluntary 
election. The first Hapsburg to attempt to rule 
Bohemia was Rudolph (1306- 1307), who was 
forced upon the country for a short time by the 
German Emperor, and who attempted to secure 
the color of a right to rule by marrying the widow 
of the last Bohemian King of the Pfemysl line. 
His right to rule was contested, and upon his death 
the Bohemians selected several kings from other 
ruling houses, and it was not until 1437 that an- 
other Hapsburg, Albrecht, was again voluntarily 
elected King of Bohemia. But after a brief rule 
of two years, during which he violated his oath 



DESERVES FREEDOM 125 

and his pledges to the Bohemian people, he was 
again succeeded by a line of kings elected from 
various ruling houses, and the greatest of them, 
George of Podebrad, the Protestant king who 
ruled from 1458 to 1471, from among their own 
nobility. 

It was not until 1526 that another Hapsburg, 
Ferdinand I., was elected king by the Bohemian 
Diet, but he soon destroyed the old charter in 
accordance with which he was recognized as a 
king by election, and usurped the power which the 
House of Hapsburg continued to exercise for 
some time. But in 16 19 the Bohemians reasserted 
their right to elect their kings and chose Frederick 
of the Palatinate, thus precipitating the Thirty 
Years' War. But notwithstanding the reverses 
which the Bohemians suffered, Ferdinand II. of 
Hapsburg, who ascended the throne, was obliged to 
take oath " to maintain the privileges and liberties 
of the kingdom " and to " govern the kingdom ac- 
cording to the laws and usages of the kings, his 
predecessors, and especially Charles IV." 

During the long dark night which followed the 
deep tragedy of the Thirty Years' War, the Haps- 
burgs ruled over Bohemia, but the nation never 
conceded them the right to incorporate their coun- 
try in any other, and in 1868 formally declared 
that " the Kingdom of Bohemia is attached to the 



126 BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

empire by a purely personal tie," — that is, through 
the person of the king who was also Emperor 
of Austria. Francis Josef himself soon after 
recognized this right and promised to be crowned 
King of Bohemia, but this promise was broken. 
For the reasons here given the Bohemians claim 
that their kingdom is still a distinct political 
entity. 

2. Their political capacity. — Time and again the 
Bohemians have demonstrated their loyalty to high 
political ideals and their capacity for self-govern- 
ment. They never recognized the " divine right " 
of kings to rule, — unlike their German neighbors, 
most of whom recognize the " right " to-day. 
They elected their own kings, who were bound by 
what was practically equivalent to our modern con- 
stitution, and they sometimes chose these kings 
from their own midst; before the outbreak of the 
Thirty Years' War they were seriously contem- 
plating a form of government not unlike that of 
our own country; and to-day they are hoping for 
a republic, or at least for a monarchy as liberal 
and innocuous as that of England. Indeed, for 
several centuries their political ideals have ap- 
proached nearer to those of England than of any 
other of the greater European nations. 

3. Their intellectual power. — A nation claiming 
the right of self-government is usually expected 



DESERVES FREEDOM 127 

to show competent intellectual capacity. This the 
Bohemians have demonstrated beyond a doubt. 
When we consider the great odds against which 
they contended when they struggled to re- 
establish their schools and their intellectual life, 
the progress which they have made in the past 
century is astonishing. The city of Prague is 
to-day one of the greatest publishing centres in 
Europe. The growth of Bohemian literature in 
all its branches has been stupendous, and to-day 
Bohemia leads the Empire of Austria with the 
smallest percentage of illiterates and is one of the 
leaders of Europe in this respect! 

Nor are these educational and intellectual ideals 
a gift of the Germans, as has been asserted in cer- 
tain prejudiced quarters. Bohemia had a great 
university, that of Prague, before a single institu- 
tion of the kind had been established within the 
limits either of the present German Empire or 
any other part of the present Empire of Austria. 
This has been claimed repeatedly as a German uni- 
versity, but it was established in 1348 by Charles 
rV., whose mother was a Bohemian, and whose 
sentiments were wholly Bohemian. He was edu- 
cated in the University of Paris, and that institu- 
tion furnished the model for his new university. 
Following the Paris plan he gave two votes to the 
German nations in the management of the univer- 



128 BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

sity (a courtesy which they have never been in- 
chned to imitate), but like all other institutions 
of that period the university was Latin, and not 
in any sense German. Fifty years later it passed 
wholly under the control of the Bohemians and 
developed into one of the greatest universities of 
Europe, sharing this honor with Paris and Oxford, 
and for more than two centuries it continued to be 
one of the world's great centres of intellectual 
activity and inspiration. The Thirty Years' War 
overwhelmed it, and transformed it into a German 
institution for a long time, but a third of a cen- 
tury ago it was re-established as a Bohemian in- 
stitution, and has now far outstripped its German 
rival in the same city which was forced upon the 
nation in the effort to Germanize it. 

It is also a matter of historic interest that as 
early as 1294 a King of Bohemia, Vaclav II., at- 
tempted to establish a university at Prague, but the 
plan failed because of dissensions between the ec- 
clesiastics and the nobility. 

The Bohemian people have abundant intellectual 
traditions of their own, and their devotion to their 
educational interests has been tested repeatedly 
and found not wanting. 

4. The moral and ethical right. — ^Why should 
any other nation rule Bohemia? The Bohemian 
people are intellectual, with, high political ideals 



DESERVES FREEDOM 129 

and splendid traditions, and they are industrially- 
progressive. They are competent to direct their 
own affairs, and it is only the insolent usurper 
who can assume to lay claim to the right to rule 
over them. Bohemia is a fertile country blessed 
with boundless riches which should be employed to 
sustain a happy, busy, progressive nation, and not 
a usurping military power, and that nation has a 
right to be free ! 

This briefly is the Bill of Rights of the Bohemian 
nation. Whatsoever may be the form of the gov- 
ernment which will come to liberated Bohemia, 
all lovers of freedom will join in the hope of the 
realization of the spirit of the prophecy of Doctor 
John Jesensky of Jesen, one of the martyr leaders 
of the Bohemians who were executed at Prague in 
162 1, who proclaimed from the scaffold: "It is 
vain that Ferdinand gluts his rage for blood; a 
king elected by us shall again ascend the throne 
of Bohemia ! " 



IV 

THE BOHEMIAN CHARACTER 

By Herbert Adolphus Miller, Ph.D., Pro- 
fessor OF Sociology, Oberlin College, 
Ohio * 

THE mental and moral characteristics of any 
social group are the product of a wide 
variety of complex influences of a pre- 
eminently psychological nature. The suggestions 
that come through tradition and history result in 
mental reactions that become so typical of the 
group that it is popular to call them inborn and 
racial. The easy assumption of this explanation 
hinders the more fundamental discovery of why 
certain characteristics prevail. The Bohemians 
illustrate this principle of the creative influence of 
definite ideas. 

A Bohemian is a Slav. The influence of this 
relationship is the broadest and most general. It 
has become self-conscious only in comparatively 
recent times, i.e., two or three generations. Previ- 

* Professor Miller has traveled in Bohemia and is gathering mate- 
rial on the history of that country. 

130 



THE BOHEMIAN CHARACTER 131 

ously there was much changing from Slav to Teu- 
ton and vice versa. Unquestionably a very large 
proportion of Prussians have a considerable in- 
fusion of Slavic blood, and many Bohemians have 
German ancestors. In centres like Pilsen or 
Prague, where the two races have lived together for 
a long time, it is absolutely impossible to tell them 
apart until they begin to speak, and then the iden- 
tity may be concealed by using the other language. 
Within the last seventy-five years there has been 
a clear recognition of the Slavic relationship which 
has taken the form of conscious efforts to preserve 
certain Slavic characteristics, and to join with the 
others in withstanding the influence and authority 
of the Germans. There have been certain other 
Slavic characteristics that have persisted in all the 
Slavic groups which will be mentioned later when 
we consider their contribution to democracy. 

For something over five hundred years the Bo- 
hemians have been clearly conscious of their 
Bohemian nationality and much that is distinctive 
of them has been developed and is still being de- 
veloped in them by this national history, and 
nothing of it can be understood except in the light 
of this historical influence. The two most influen- 
tial forces have been John Hus, who made Bohemia 
Protestant a century before Luther, and who was 
burned at the stake in 141 5; and Comenius the 



132 BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

world educator, who was exiled for his connec- 
tion with the Protestant Church of Bohemian 
Brethren. These two national heroes planted the 
seeds which differentiated the Bohemians from the 
rest of the Slavs in religious freedom and respect 
for education. Hus also was the symbol for the 
development of nationalism and the consequent 
revival of the language which have occupied such a 
large place in the attention of the Bohemian people. 
The two most characteristic expressions of these 
influences are now found in Nationalism and Free- 
thought, and no appreciation of the condition and 
purposes of the people can be complete without 
reckoning with these facts. 

From about 1400 for more than two hundred 
years Bohemia was a leader in European culture, 
but the Thirty Years' War crushed her so that 
some claim that she has had no history since 1620. 
Count Liitzow says that " Bohemia presents the 
nearly unique case of a country which was formerly 
almost entirely Protestant and has become almost 
entirely Catholic. The popular optimistic fallacy 
which maintains that in no country has the re- 
ligious belief been entirely suppressed by persecu- 
tion and brute force is disproved by the fate of 
Bohemia." As a matter of fact, instead of being 
suppressed, it was smouldering during the cen- 
turies and now constitutes an amazing unanim- 



THE BOHEMIAN CHARACTER 133 

ity of mind and feeling among the nation in regard 
to religion. Immediately after the Act of Toler- 
ance in 1 78 1 there sprang up here and there 
churches which took up the old faith exactly where 
it had been left more than a hundred and fifty 
years before. Free-thinking is in part a philos- 
ophy, but it is more particularly a sign of national 
character. 

In the past it has been the custom of nations 
to try to absorb all within their political bound- 
aries into the character of the governing group, 
however much they may have differed in traditions 
and customs. Austria not only tried to make Bo- 
hemians Catholics but Germans, and the history 
of the effort ought to make clear for ever that 
political science must adjust itself to the laws of 
human nature, and that the way to develop the 
individualism of a people is to try to blot it out. 
Whatever may be said about the superiority of 
one culture over another it cannot be imposed by 
force, and the Germans have been stupidly slow 
in discovering this fundamental fact. Bohemia is 
but a single example of this new consciousness 
which is called Nationalism. The Poles, Lithua- 
nians, Finns, Magyars, Irish, and all the Slavic 
groups are showing that there is a psychological 
force to be reckoned with which military force 
cannot overcome. The contribution of the variety 



134 BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

of cultures is what will enrich the life of civiliza- 
tion and not the pre-eminence of one, whatever 
that one may be. Some evidence of the way in 
which the revival of nation spirit is taking place 
among the Bohemians will show what a tremen- 
dous force this spirit is. 

Count Liitzow, in an address given in Prague 
in 191 1, brings out the present situation : " One of 
the most interesting facts that in Bohemia and 
especially in Prague mark the period of peace at 
the beginning of the nineteenth century is the re- 
vival of the national feeling and language. . . . 
The greatest part of Bohemia, formerly almost 
Germanized, has now again become thoroughly 
Slavic. The national language, for a time used 
only by the peasantry in outlying districts, is now 
freely and generally used by the educated classes 
in most parts of the country, Prague itself, that 
had for a time acquired almost the appearance of a 
German town, has now a thoroughly Slavic char- 
acter. The national literature also, which had al- 
most ceased to exist, is in a very flourishing state, 
particularly since the foundation of a national 
university. At no period have so many and so 
valuable books been written in the Bohemian lan- 
guage." 

About sixty years ago several Bohemian writ- 
ers were bold enough to write in their own Ian- 



THE BOHEMIAN CHARACTER 135 

guage instead of German and from that time the 
Bohemian spirit has grown until opposition to the 
overbearing Germanism became almost a passion. 
Wherever the Germans vi^ere in a majority only 
German public schools were provided, but wherever 
the municipality had fewer Germans than Slavs 
German as well as Bohemian schools were pro- 
vided. To meet this discrimination Bohemians, 
both at home and in America, have contributed to a 
remarkable degree for the " Mother of Schools " 
(association) which supports Bohemian schools of 
first caliber in the minority communities. There 
are no other Slavs who compare with the Bohe- 
mians in the high regard for schools. As one 
goes through the country he is struck by the palatial 
school building even in poor peasant villages. It 
seems to bear a relation similar to the prison and 
church in a Russian town. The inevitable result 
of this universal spirit is the gradual elimination 
of the German language. German had nearly 
vanished from the streets of Prague. One fared 
ill in a restaurant if his German were good enough 
to sound genuine though the waiter understood 
perfectly. Business men were beginning to take 
pride in the fact that they could succeed without 
knowing any German, and fathers who were reared 
with German as a mother tongue taught their chil- 
dren Bohemian instead. The unifying force of 



136 BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

this national feeling has been going on with great 
rapidity in the face of the disrupting force of 
eleven political parties, besides the sharp spiritual 
division into Catholics and anti-Catholics. 

It could not fail to be a distinct disadvantage 
for a people of seven or eight million to cut itself 
off from the opportunities of the environing Ger- 
man culture, science, and commerce, but those who 
saw this most clearly deliberately assumed the cost 
in their struggle for the freedom of the spirit. 
When we remember that prestige was on the side 
of the German one sees a sacrifice approaching 
nobility. At the time the Olympic games were be- 
ing held in Europe and attracting the attention of 
the world a far more important athletic meet was 
being held in Prague. This was Slavic in its mem- 
bership, though Bohemian in its origin. More 
than twenty thousand persons took part, and at 
one time eleven thousand men, speaking several 
different languages, were doing calisthenic exer- 
cises together. With the exception of the Poles, 
who would not come because the Russians were in- 
vited, there were representatives of all the Slavic 
nationalities, and the keynote of every speech was 
"Slavic! Slavic!" and when it was uttered the 
crowds would go wild. There were a quarter of 
a million visitors in the city, and illustrated re- 
ports of the exhibition went to the ends of the 



THE BOHEMIAN CHARACTER 137 

Slavic world. A few weeks afterwards I saw some 
of them pasted on the wall of a primitive factory 
in the back districts of Moscow. But the German 
papers completely ignored the whole thing and no 
self-respecting German could attend, though it was 
undoubtedly the greatest thing of the sort ever 
held. 

Two years ago when war was threatening be- 
tween Austria and Serbia, Bohemians who were 
being entrained from their garrison for mobiliza- 
tion on the Serbian border, in more than one case 
sang the Pan-Slavic hymn, " Hej Slovane ! " fa- 
miliar to all Slavic nations, but forbidden to Aus- 
trian soldiers in service. They used a popular 
parody in this enthusiastic and powerful hymn, 
full of encouragement to the Slavs, telling them that 
their language shall never perish nor shall they 
" even though the number of Germans equal the 
number of souls In hell." It is said that at this 
time at least seventy thousand Slavs in Austria 
eligible to military service quit the country. 

The Germans have succeeded in making the Bo- 
hemian culture almost identical with theirs, and it 
is difficult to find in the German any traits that 
can be called specifically Bohemian. Only a long 
future can tell whether there are actually inherent 
psychological differences which can account for 
aggressiveness in the one and passivity in the other. 



138 BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

We may assume, however, that we have, not had 
time to test the subtle forces which work on social 
groups and give them a cast of thought that 
seems biologically inherent. No Slavic people has 
exhibited the individualistic character of the Teu- 
ton, but we have no assurance that this Teuton 
habit of mind is the result of anything except the 
history and the philosophy which have been appro- 
priated in comparatively modern times. There 
are two ways of explaining the relative passivity 
of the Slavic mind. One is the fact that having 
been for so long a subject people they have no tradi- 
tions of success. Even the Russians are ruled by 
a bureaucracy with which they have no sympathy. 
The other is that the Bohemians and the others 
have retained the democratic characteristics which 
are common to the Slavs. There has been some 
influence from both. 

One peculiarity of Bohemians both in America 
and Bohemia is the habit of criticising any of their 
own people who acquire any eminence or leader- 
ship in any field. One never feels free to speak 
with enthusiasm about a successful Bohemian lest 
he invite a dash of cold water. There seems to 
be universal suspicion of the motives or methods 
underlying the success. If a leader were to appear 
he would not get followers. Such a habit of mind 
can never bring anything that corresponds to im- 



THE BOHEMIAN CHARACTER 139 

perialistic success. Count Liitzow says " that the 
evil seed of hatred and distrust sown by the op- 
pressors in the seventeenth and eighteenth cen- 
turies bears evil fruit up to the present day. Bo- 
hemian peasants even now instinctively distrust 
the nobles of their own race who are in full sym- 
pathy with the national cause. This antagonism 
has frequently contributed to the failure of the 
attempts of the Bohemians to recover their 
autonomy." 

There is a great difference in an individual or 
a people that has been accustomed to accomplish- 
ment. The attitude in Bohemia has been that of 
pessimistic resignation. Their devotion to certain 
ideals and causes is magnificent, but the inability 
to organize unanimously is indicated by the eleven 
political parties, most of which are nationalistic 
and none of which has the active co-operation of 
the masses. They follow an ideal rather than a 
person, and the symbol of the ideal is always a 
person who is dead. The look is thus backward 
rather than hopefully forward. Hus is the great 
hero, but also Comenius, Palacky, Havlicek, and 
many others of more or less remoteness are the 
real leaders, and the reinstatement of national self- 
direction and the Bohemian language are the ideal 
objects. 

In Bohemia these result in an impracticalness 



140 BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

which magnifies the aesthetic even to sentimental- 
ity. They will talk as though art were the end 
of life. For many the aesthetic life consists of 
sitting in restaurants night after night listening 
to the band and talking over their beer. In spite 
of this industry has made great progress in Bo- 
hemia, and when they come to this country they 
forget their objection to the practical. There are 
probably no other immigrants in America who 
make such direct efforts to own their own homes 
as the Bohemians. At a gathering of instructors 
of the University of Prague to organize a soci- 
ological institute, I was asked to tell some of the 
things we do here. I tried to show how we com- 
bine theory with practice and emphasized my own 
interest which is theoretical, but they unanimously 
said that our methods were too practical to be 
used by them. 

A comparison of Poles and Bohemians who be- 
long to the same race shows the influence of cul- 
ture on the Bohemian. In 1900 the percentage 
of illiterates among the Bohemians entering the 
United States was 3. and of Poles 31.6. The 
Poles are as strongly the Catholic as the Bohe- 
mians are Free-thinkers. 

In Austria there are fourteen times as many 
cases of litigation in the courts among the Poles 
as among the Bohemians. A Bohemian in Chi- 



THE BOHEMIAN CHARACTER 141 

cago who does a large mail order business among 
all Slavs says : " We will not do business with the 
Poles at all because they will not pay. To the 
Serbians we send everything C.O.D., but the 
Croatians, Ruthenians, and the rest we trust." 

The family life is an important sign of the 
morality of a people, and we find among the Bo- 
hemians many interesting qualities. The follow- 
ing statement in " Hull House Papers " derived 
from a study of Bohemians says : " The family 
life is affectionate, and it is the prevailing custom 
among the working class to give all the wages to 
the mother." I have often noticed that in families 
the income is naturally estimated as the total 
earnings of husband and children and that the 
mother gives even to the larger children who are 
earning good wages what money they need, and al- 
ways with cheerfulness and perfect understanding. 
The attachment for the home is very strong, and 
they take pride in large families which stick to- 
gether. It is probable that ownership of the home 
works both ways in this matter, having the home 
integrates the family and having the family unity 
makes it desirable to own a home. 

In sex morality we must remember that the 
Bohemians are European and not American, but 
on the streets of Prague there is less public display 
of immorality than in Chicago. Modesty is ob- 



142 BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

served as an important virtue. The Bohemians, 
like all other people, have prejudices that make it 
difficult for them to see clearly values not meas- 
ured by their own standard, but there can be no 
question but that their standard measures up well 
with any people in Europe. The important thing 
to civilization is whether they have any peculiar 
traits of mind or character that will be a contribu- 
tion to progress. I think that the Bohemians have 
this in common with the other Slavs to a very 
marked degree and in a direction which has 
hitherto been entirely unrecognized, and this is the 
contribution to democracy. 

However else the Germans may justify the pres- 
ent war, they sincerely believe that on their suc- 
cess hangs the salvation of civilization from the 
barbarism of the half-civilized Slav. Professors 
Eucken and Haeckel have voiced a widespread in- 
dignation that England could so far forget her 
ideals as to join with Russia against the forces of 
enlightenment. Americans, even those whose 
sympathies are hostile to Germans, dread success 
of the Russians. The socialists who are opposed to 
all war feel convinced that Russia is a menace to 
all their plans. In fact they have tacitly admitted 
more than once that it might be necessary to resist 
encroachments of Russia by force. It is my con- 
tention that the Slavic people, of whom the Rus- 



THE BOHEMIAN CHARACTER 143 

sians are the largest group, have more to con- 
tribute to what the world needs next than any 
other people, and that all that is best in socialism 
will find its fruition among them as nowhere 
else. 

A learned Bohemian friend, in reply to my letter 
to Bohemia, in which I spoke of the political prog- 
ress America was making, said that it could but 
fill the heart of a Bohemian " with a feeling of sad 
resignation " ; but he adds, " I am not pessimistic 
enough to give up all hope that Providence may 
have yet some good things in store for the Slav. 
What keeps me up is a certain hazy impression 
that human development may sometime be in want 
of a new formula, and then our time may come. I 
conceive ourselves under the sway of the German 
watchword which spells Force; and as watch- 
words, like everything else human, come and go, 
perhaps the Slavs may sometime be called on to 
introduce another, which I should like to see 
spelled Charity." 

There is no literature in the world which has 
contributed so much toward such a sentiment as 
that of the Slavs. Tolstoy is the great example, 
and his very greatness enabled him to propose a 
program even beyond present imagination, but 
many other writers, some of whom have been 
translated and some not, have expressed the same 



144. BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

ideal of needed radical reform. We must not 
make the mistake of thinking these writers the 
originators of their doctrines. A popular prophet 
expresses the heart of the people, and is a product 
of their ideals. The great vogue of these writers 
is among their own people. The government of 
Russia is hostile to Tolstoy, but it could not re- 
sist the demands of the students that an heroic 
statue of this radical be placed in the great govern- 
ment technical school. 

The ultimate goal of society is democracy and, 
strange as it may sound, the Slav has more to 
contribute to this end than anyone else. Russia, 
whose name is the synonym of despotism, is already 
in reality the most democratic country in the world. 
Democracy means the opportunity for the indi- 
vidual to express himself to the utmost, to have 
his expression count according to its value, and if 
he does not predominate to yield gracefully to 
the expression that does prevail. This habit of 
mind cannot be obtained without practice, and up 
to the present time in the world's history would 
not have been as efficient as the leadership of indi- 
viduals who, right or wrong, obtained results. 
Now by means of rapid communication and a 
clearer understanding of social purposes the 
method of democracy can be applied with increas- 
ing efficiency. Nurture in democratic practice is 



THE BOHEMIAN CHARACTER 145 

the contribution the Slavs will make, and we can- 
not realize how rich this will be. 

The despotism of Russia is no m.ore an expres- 
sion of the real Russian people than Tammany 
Hall is an expression of American democracy, and 
the influence of both institutions on national char- 
acter has been practically nothing. Despotisms 
come and go, but the traditions and customs of 
the people persist. It was formerly thought that 
ideals were imposed from above, but now we are 
becoming pretty thoroughly convinced that this is 
not the case. Imitation is horizontal between 
people of the same class and not vertical between 
classes. Polish nobles had glass windows for 
years, but it did not occur to the peasants to have 
them until the idea was brought back from Amer- 
ica by people of their own sort. And so influences 
and habits may go on for centuries upon centuries 
without being affected by a different culture. This 
fortunate fact has enabled us to preserve what 
would have been eliminated by the contemporary 
values and customs that were not valuable for 
the time. 

Any observant traveler entering Russia, after he 
gets over the first fear which everyone seems to 
feel, will gradually be impressed with the contrast 
to the Germans and Austrians whom he has just 
left. There he was never addressed without his 



146 BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

full title of Herr Professor, Herr Journalist, or 
whatever he might claim for his distinction. Here 
his self-esteem suffers a shock, for, in the lan- 
guage of the country, he becomes simply " Mister." 
This universal custom, unimportant in itself, is 
significant of a national habit of mind. Men in 
high places, as heads of universities, are addressed 
by their colleagues by their first names. In the 
familiar Russian and Polish novel we find nobles 
and military leaders regularly with the simple 
title Pan (Mr.), which is a term of respect but not 
of distinction. In fact the attitude of the noble 
and the peasant toward each other is not that of 
superiority and servility, but as elder and younger 
brother. The name Little Father which is applied 
to the Czar expresses the attitude of familiarity 
rather than of awe. Compare this with the wor- 
ship of uniform in Germany, where a policeman 
will not answer your question unless you salute 
him and an omitted title is an insult. In Petrograd 
during student riots it is not an uncommon thing 
for the students to kick the shins of the police 
and no one thinks of it as lese majeste. The Rus- 
sian officer and soldier are more nearly comrades 
than in any other army in the world. 

These habits have not been assumed deliberately, 
but are the product of underlying institutions out 
of which they have grown naturally. At least 



THE BOHEMIAN CHARACTER 147 

fifty million people in Greater Russia and Siberia 
live in Mirs or Communes. In these from time 
immemorial they have practiced a degree of co- 
operation and local self-government which has 
never been equalled by deliberate action in the 
most enlightened nations, and which the most 
despotic government, not being able to overthrow, 
has recently incorporated into its governmental 
method. In the Mir the land which is owned in 
common is regularly reallotted among the house- 
holders according to their working capacities and 
needs. The Mir elects its own executive and may 
undertake all kinds of work of public utility. 
Occasionally a woman is elected as executive, and 
when the man representing the household is away 
or dead the woman votes and takes part in the 
assembly. The Mirs are united into larger bodies 
with similar jurisdiction. The interesting thing 
about it is that it prevails so widely and among 
people between whom there has not been the slight- 
est possibility of intercommunication. The prom- 
ise of the Mir is not communism, but a habit of 
mind that can be applied in more general and 
complex affairs. 

Complaint has more or less justly been made 
that the Slav is deficient in political leadership ex- 
cept in the smallest units. This can have been 
true in the past while holding for a future under 



148 BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

quite different conditions. Ease of communication 
has enlarged social units so that common ideas 
may result in common action over wide areas as 
easily as in a common room. At any rate the 
Slavs have succeeded in carrying over their custom 
in a very remarkable manner. The artel, which is 
a co-operative productive organization, embraces 
most diverse enterprises throughout Russia, and 
is efficient in a manner only dreamed of else- 
where. Tiffany's finest silver enamel is mostly 
made by peasant artels in Moscow. In one small 
factory where most of the men were away get- 
ting in their harvests, the rest were making beau- 
tiful inlaid Easter eggs, and a special order of ice 
cream dishes worth a hundred dollars apiece, yet 
these work-owners were so untouched by modern 
customs and the civilization for which they were 
producing that they ate their dinner from a com- 
mon dish with wooden spoons. The porters at 
the railroad stations are artels governed by their 
own rules and sharing the proceeds. Many banks 
and large enterprises are carried on in the same 
way. One of the largest restaurants in Petrograd 
is owned by the men who do the work. Fishing is 
also co-operative in its methods. Undertakings 
of this sort could not possibly be carried through 
so generally and so successfully if it were not for 
the great background of experience in which co- 



THE BOHEMIAN CHARACTER 149 

operation and acquiescence to the will of the peo- 
ple is accepted as a matter of course. 

We recognize that one of the greatest problems 
of our time is that of class consciousness between 
labor and capital, and economists have suggested 
co-operation as the only cure for the deadlock that 
threatens, but it has not succeeded where tried. 
The Russians have succeeded without being con- 
scious that they were doing any but the most 
natural thing. For people who have been forbid- 
den so much that is thought to be essential to 
freedom, it is nothing short of remarkable, that 
in the recent years of industrial progress and in- 
creasing complexity, they should have been able 
to adapt their democracy to fit the needs. No- 
where are labor unions formed more easily, and 
while meager in their activities, as compared to 
American or English, they have coherence. 

The church has developed in line with the 
characteristics of the people. Although the Or- 
thodox Church is magnificent in its equipment, and 
its priests most richly caparisoned, yet it offers 
a marked contrast to the aristocratic system of 
the Roman Catholic Church. The Russian most 
devoutly takes off his hat in passing a church or 
holy image, but he keeps it on when passing the 
priest, and he kisses the priest on the cheek rather 
than the hand. 



150 BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

Among other Slavs there is the same widespread 
prevalence of democratic customs. In Serbia the 
Mir is found in much the same form as in Russia, 
and in Poland in numerous instances the Zadruga 
is a community of from ten to sixty or more liv- 
ing in one house and settling important matters by 
vote. The head of the Zadruga is generally the 
oldest man, but this is not necessary, and not in- 
frequently a woman is head. In the days of its 
independence the Polish king was always elected. 
The suffrage was restricted to the nobles, and 
much turbulence prevailed at the time of election, 
but the people were very jealous of the privilege. 

Of all the Slavs the Bohemians have come most 
under German influence and it has often been said 
that the assimilation is all in the direction of 
the German. In many characteristics this is true, 
but some of the traditional habits of mind have 
clearly been preserved. They have not lost these 
by being transferred to America and are able to 
carry on certain forms of association with phe- 
nomenal success. In Chicago they have 104 Build- 
ing and Loan Associations incorporated under the 
laws of Illinois. All are prosperous, only one has 
ever failed. Each has only one paid ojfficer, a sec- 
retary who receives from five to ten dollars a 
week. One association has assets of $600,000, 
and all of them aggregate about $14,000,000 and 



THE BOHEMIAN CHARACTER 151 

20,000 members. They also have numerous 
benevolent lodges with an aggregate membership 
of over 100,000 in the United States, which man- 
age insurance systems on a most democratic and 
safe basis. This management in almost all cases 
includes women in exact equality. The same thing 
is true of the Sokol or gymnastic society which is 
organized in all Slavic countries. In the numer- 
ous deliberative meetings of Bohemians that I 
have attended the women have shown themselves 
quite the equal of the men in debate. 

The ultimate democracy must include universal 
suffrage, which we see has its roots in the Slavic 
institutions. The Bohemians have the arguments 
of the Germans about the place of women, but 
their practice is more subtly democratic than they 
are aware of. Until it was confused with the 
prohibition question Bohemians have consistently 
advocated equal suffrage, before it became gener- 
ally popular. The Germans have as consistently 
opposed it. 

Whatever the outcome of the war the Slavs will 
inevitably become an increasing influence in the 
world's progress because of their higher birth 
rate and because they possess the richest natural 
resources in the world. It is perhaps an occasion 
for gratitude that in the midst of the apparently 
insoluble problems about the exploitation of 



152 BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

natural resources and labor conflicts, a people 
that has been nurturing in what we have called 
barbarism the traits most desirable for dealing with 
such problems, is now about to come upon the 
stage. 

To be sure, most of the Slavic world is per- 
meated by ignorance and dominated by bureau- 
cracy, but education is only a generation deep, and 
political reorganization is the most rapid and re- 
markable fact of our era. The Bohemians have 
shown us that under modern conditions these 
traits are not lost. Civilization may have a tempo- 
rary setback, but it cannot be as great as that now 
arising from militarism, but in the end the Slav 
will contribute to the social fabric that for which 
it is now peculiarly ready. In the words of an 
ancient writer we may say that the stone which 
the builder rejected is become the head of the 
corner. 



V 



PLACE OF BOHEMIA IN THE CREATIVE 
ARTS 

By Will S. Monroe, Professor State Normal 
School, Montclair, N, J., Author of " Bo- 
hemia AND THE CeCHS," " CoMENIUS AND THE 

Beginnings of Educational Reform," etc.* 

IT remains to call attention to the place of 
Bohemia in letters, art, music, education, 
social and religious reform. In this connec- 
tion it may be pointed out that the civilization of 
the Bohemians is distinctly older than that of the 
German-Austrians, and that it developed wholly 
independent of the Teutonic art movements in 
Germany and Austria. 

In the matter of literature, Bohemia occupies a 
place of distinction and priority. The development 
of the vulgar tongue took place at a comparatively 
early period. Some of the most ancient of the 
poetic documents date back to very early times. 
Indeed, the prose literature of Bohemia, after the 

• Professor Monroe has made numerous pilgrimages to Bohemia 
and his knowledge of Bohemians is intimate and thorough. He is a 
" Bohemian by adoption." 

153 



154 BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

Greek and Latin, is one of the oldest in Europe. 
The three centuries from the time of Charles IV. 
to the outbreak of the Thirty Years' War covers 
the early brilliant period in literature. Two cen- 
turies of intellectual barrenness followed the fatal 
battle of the White Mountain and the usurpation 
of the Bohemian Crown by the House of Hapsburg. 
The ancient constitution of the kingdom was sup- 
pressed and it was replaced by a slightly veiled 
system of Teutonic absolutism. The lands of the 
Bohemian nobles, who had been patrons of letters, 
were confiscated and given to generals in the Aus- 
trian army and to Austrian noblemen. The in- 
habitants of the flourishing cities, that had been 
strongholds of the national language and litera- 
ture, were driven into exile and their places were 
taken by immigrants of non-Bohemian birth. 
The country people were reduced to a state of serf- 
dom and attached to the soil. The pillory, the 
gallows, and the whipping-post were the sinister 
arguments that were employed to obliterate all 
traces of national culture. 

Not only was there a complete arrest in the re- 
markable literary movement that intervened be- 
tween the Middle Ages and the beginning of the 
Thirty Years' War, but most of the literary treas- 
ures of the previous centuries were destroyed by 
the royal edicts of the reactionary Hapsburg 



BOHEMIA IN THE CREATIVE ARTS 155 

rulers. This was done with the notion that the 
brilHant period of Bohemian existence might be 
blotted out and forgotten. The book-destroyers 
that were turned loose in the land burned not only 
all historical and theological works, but every 
form of literary composition that might suggest 
to the Bohemian people their glorious past. One 
book-destroyer, an Austrian priest, boasted with 
pride that he had burned 60,000 Bohemian books. 
Many works were carried by the Bohemian exiles 
to Saxony, Slovakland, and other countries, and 
preserved; and these, together with others that 
escaped the fury of pillaging soldiers during the 
Thirty Years' War, constitute the fragments out 
of which the literary history before the seventeenth 
century must be constructed. But these fragments 
are little more than the planks of a ship that was 
wrecked on the ocean of national vicissitude. 

The modern Bohemian literary movement dates 
back only one hundred years. Joseph Dobrovsky 
(1753-1829), the patriarch of Slavic philology, 
initiated the literary movement at the beginning 
of the nineteenth century. The few other Bohe- 
mian scholars of the day — Jungmann, Palacky, 
Kollar, Safafik, and the incomparable publicist 
Charles Havlicek — lent their services to the re- 
habilitation of a national language that was long 
supposed to be dead. The letters of Jungmann 



156 BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

give us our most intimate accounts of the strug- 
gles of himself and his co-patriots during the early 
day of the modern Bohemian literary renascence.* 
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries 
the Austrian Government had penalized the pub- 
lication of books in the Bohemian language and 
the teaching of the vernacular in the schools of 
the kingdom. But in spite of prohibitions of the 
Hapsburg rulers, the vernacular continued to be 
spoken in the country districts. This fact facili- 
tated the extraordinary progress made in the fields 
of poetry, drama, fiction, criticism, and historical 
works during the last fourscore years. The 
satirical writings of Jan Neruda, the historical 
dramas of Alois Jirasek, the rich lyrical poetry of 
Jaroslav Vrchlicky (Frida), the bold imaginative 
compositions of Julius Zeyer, the modernist poetry 
of J. S. Machar, the great national epics of 
Svatopluk Cech, the historical works of Francis 
Palacky, and the political and sociological writings 
of Thomas G. Masaryk have made notable con- 
tributions to the literary history of modern Bo- 
hemia. When one recalls the dearth of literature 
from Teutonic writers in Austria during the same 
period, the contrast is marked indeed. 

* The story is too long to be told in this connection; pnd the in- 
terested reader is referred to " History of Bohemian Literature," by 
Count Liitzow (London and New York, 1899), and " Bohemia and 
the Cechs," by Will S. Monroe (Boston and London, 1910). 



BOHEMIA IN THE CREATIVE ARTS 157 

In matters of art also Bohemia was early in the 
field. The Prague school of painting that came 
into prominence during the reign of Charles IV. 
(1316-1378) took favorable rank with similar 
early art movements in Italy. Painters, sculptors, 
and architects trained in Bohemia are represented 
to-day at most of the great cities in Europe where 
art treasures are preserved. The zealous and 
promising artistic movement inaugurated in the 
country by the followers of the Prague school, • 
like most of the other culture movements in the 
kingdom, was well-nigh extinguished by the at- 
tempted Teutonization of the country by the Haps- 
burg rulers after the fatal Bila Hora. 

The political and literary activity in Bohemia 
during the opening years of the last century re- 
acted favorably on the art life of the nation. A 
society of the fine arts, that was distinctly Bohe- 
mian and national in character, was organized at 
Prague in 1848; and this was followed by annual 
expositions of the chief productions of Bohemian 
and foreign artists. As an immediate result of 
these activities, Bohemia produced an astonish- 
ingly large number of painters who took high rank 
in their art, artists of the rare talent of Helllch, 
Manes, Cermak, Schwaiger, Ales, Brozik, Mucha, 
Uprka. In sculpture, too, modern Bohemia has 



158 BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

taken a place of distinction in the works of 
Myslbek, Simek, Seidan, Sucharda, and Saloun. 

Bohemia's music is probably better known 
throughout the civilized world than any other 
branch of her creative art. This is largely due to 
the universal character of the language of music 
and to the eminence of her great tone poets, 
Smetana and Dvorak. Not that the history of 
music in the country begins with these two mod- 
ern composers, but because they spoke in such 
musical forms and with such musical force that 
they arrested the attention of the world. 

We read in the chronicles of the mediaeval' his- 
torians of the role played by music in the life of 
the Bohemian people; and we know that during 
the Hussite period the Bohemian hymnology at- 
tained a degree of excellence that has not been 
surpassed by later ages. The Bohemian school of 
music of to-day takes foremost rank among the 
music schools of modern Europe. 

Bohemia's position in the matter of education 
is likewise distinctive. Education of an elemen- 
tary and secondary character was general in Bo- 
hemia several centuries in advance of Austria and 
Germany. The University of Prague antedated 
similar institutions in Germany by more than 
half a century. John Amos Komensky (known in 
America and England by the Latinized form of his 



BOHEMIA IN THE CREATIVE ARTS 159 

name, Comenius) was a Bohemian, and in the 
judgment of competent historians of education he 
was the real evangeHst of modern pedagogy. Most 
of the school systems of progressive and culti- 
vated European peoples are based directly upon 
ideas that he formulated. 

In the domain of religion and ethics, Bohemia 
has given the greatest moral reformer of the past 
five hundred years in Jan Hus, the forerunner of 
Martin Luther, John Calvin, and William E. 
Channing. And in Jerome of Prague, the con- 
temporary of Hus, she produced another spiritual 
leader of great power. 



VI 



THE BOHEMIANS AND THE SLAVIC 
REGENERATION 

By Leo Wiener, Professor of Slavic Lan- 
guages AND Literatures at Harvard Uni- 
versity * 

BOHEMIA is the westernmost Slavic coun- 
try and its fortunate geographical position 
between the West and the East of Europe 
and half-way between the Slavs of the Balkans 
and those of the North has in past ages determined 
its cultural mission, which has been that of mediat- 
ing between the Latin civilization and the Poles 
on the one hand and the Byzantine culture and the 
Russians on the other. Bohemia is the keystone 
in the Slavic arch. Without it the proto-history 
of the Eastern nations in Europe has no meaning 
and no coherency. Unfortunately even the most 
profound scholars have as yet overlooked the im- 
portant role which Bohemia has played in for- 
warding that Carolingian civilization which the 

* Professor Wiener is a distinguished Slavic scholar whose latest 
work, " An Interpretation of the Russian People," has just been pub- 
lished. 

160 



THE SLAVIC REGENERATION 161 

Visigoths, expelled by the Arabs from Spain and 
settled by Charlemagne in southern and central 
France, caused to radiate to the whole Germanic 
world and, through Bavaria, grafted on the neigh- 
boring Cechs. 

It is well known that the first Christian activity 
in Bohemia proceeded from German missionaries, 
but it is only a recent discovery on the origin of 
the so-called Gothic Bible which has revealed to 
me the extraordinary extent of the Visigothic liter- 
ary and cultural influences upon the Bavarians and 
the Cechs. In the light of this discovery, which 
I am now subjecting to a close scrutiny, it appears 
that a tremendous proportion of the Slavic vocabu- 
laries, from Russia to Dalmatia, from Poland to 
Bulgaria, has been borrowed from the religious 
works of the Bohemians, of the early period, now 
entirely lost to science. Bohemia was the intel- 
lectual mistress of what may be called the proto- 
Slavic world. Without Bohemia, the greater part 
of the Slavic vocabularies remains irreducible as 
regards origins and distribution, while with the 
proper appreciation of this country's geographical 
factor it appears at once that far from standing 
aloof from the Roman civilization of the early 
Middle Ages, the Slavs have been equal par- 
ticipants with the Teutons in the benefits of the 
Visigothic culture, which shows hardly any traces 



162 BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

of Teutonism, but a curious mixture of Western 
■Roman, Southern French, and Arabic elements. 
The linguistically strongest of these is the Arabic, 
for my discovery goes to show that the so-called 
Gothic Bible was written only about the year 800 
and in Southern France. 

It was only in 813 that Charlemagne introduced 
the Germanic languages to the knowledge of the 
educated, by ordering that homilies should be writ- 
ten in the native dialects. There does not exist 
the slightest evidence that, with the possible excep- 
tion of some Gothic tracts, which Bishop Ulphilas 
is said to have written in the fourth century, the 
Germans used their native dialects for any literary 
purposes. There is nothing which we possess in 
the way of literary documents that dates back of 
the ninth century, and there is precious little that 
can with certainty be ascribed to a period previous 
to the tenth century. Hence it appears that the 
literary Teutonic activity is very little, if at all, 
ahead of the distinctively Slavic literary activity, 
which, so far as we know, begins, at the end of the 
ninth century, with the translation of the Bible 
by the proto-apostles of the Slavs, Cyril and 
Methodius, for the Cechs of Bohemia. 

In the present stage of philological science it 
is impossible to ascertain the precise dialect in 
which these Bulgarian monks wrote, though the 



THE SLAVIC REGENERATION 163 

reasonable assumption is that it was that of their 
native Thessalonica. But the existence of a dis- 
tinct Slavic alphabet, the Glagolica, of which 
Cyril's alphabet is but a simplification, and the 
existence of the Freisingen fragments which, al- 
though not older than from the eleventh century, 
are written in a variant dialect and obviously are 
based on documents preceding the activity of the 
proto-apostles, make it certain that Cyril and 
Methodius drew on an older literary stock or com- 
posed in a language which was already permeated 
by the Christian conceptions which were the com- 
mon possession of the Cechs in Carolingian times. 
This is proved by the precious Kiev fragments, of 
the eleventh century, which contain the most primi- 
tive form of the Old-Slavic language and, at the 
same time, use distinctively Cech words of the 
Roman Catholic liturgy. It is, therefore, plausible 
that whatever dialect was later chosen by Cyril and 
Methodius in their religious activity in Moravia 
and Bohemia, it was based on the vocabulary which 
was already familiar to the Cechs from their previ- 
ous relations with the German missionaries. 

The Slavic liturgy did not survive long in Bo- 
hemia. After the death of Methodius in 885 the 
Slavic priests were banished and Moravia and 
Bohemia became Roman Catholic once more. Only 
the Abbey of Sazava continued to use the Slavic 



164 BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

liturgy until the year 1096, after which nothing 
more is heard of the Slavic Church. Cyril and 
Methodius, who had come to Moravia at the re- 
quest of Prince Rostislav, had in 867 been accused 
by the German missionaries of heresy, which ac- 
cusation, however, Pope Hadrian found to be 
groundless. But the Slavic activity could not be 
maintained against German arrogance, and, as it 
was Bishop Wiching who soon after the death of 
Methodius banished the Slavic liturgy from Bo- 
hemia, so it was in the eleventh century again Ger- 
man priests who destroyed the last vestige of the 
incipient Slavic culture. The Slavic liturgy left 
the country to become permanently associated with 
the Greek Catholic Church in Russia, Serbia, and 
Bulgaria. What might have formed a bond be- 
tween the various Slavic nations had been sense- 
lessly destroyed in Bohemia by the machinations 
of the German clergy. 

Again it was Bohemia which was the first coun- 
try, not only among the Slavs, but in the whole 
of Europe, to carry high the banner of religious 
freedom. The Germans boast of the contribu- 
tion to freedom of thought by their -Luther, and 
they constantly forget that a century before him 
Hus had prepared the ground for that religious 
dissent which was voiced by Luther and his 
contemporaries. In the fourteenth century Bohe- 



THE SLAVIC REGENERATION 165 

mians were fond of attending foreign universities, 
especially those of Paris and Oxford. In the 
latter place they became acquainted with Wiclif 
and, returning home, they translated his works and 
laid the foundation for that remarkable activity 
which is known as Husitism. Matej of Janov, 
who had studied at Paris, had even before Hus 
put himself in opposition to Popery, but it was 
Hus's particular desert to have roused the Cech 
national feeling. Hus was opposed not only to 
the corruptions that had crept into the Church, 
but also to the anti-nationalistic activities of the 
Germans, and so headed the movement which 
had for its purpose a Cech regeneration. 
Cech became the language of intercourse, and a 
large number of translations of the Bible into 
Cech was made between 1400 and 1430, the most 
remarkable being that written by a Taborite mil- 
ler's wife. 

Hus became the first rector of the Cech Prague 
University, after the German students had with- 
drawn to the newly formed University of Leipsic. 
Bohemia was rent by disorder, not only from with- 
out, but also within the Husitic movement itself. 
Husitism stood not only for religious freedom, 
but also for democracy, and for a time the Husites 
got along without a king. The most advanced of 
these democratic protagonists of that time was 



166 BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

Chelcicky, who dreamed of a millennium, not un- 
like the one represented in literature at the pres- 
ent time by Tolstoy. His chief desert lies In hav- 
ing, by his writings, promoted the formation of 
the Church of Bohemian Brethren. The idea of 
Slavic nationality was not confined to Bohemia 
alone. The growth of a similar national feeling in 
Poland may be discerned as the result of this Cech 
renascence, and the Southern Slavs, too, were di- 
rectly and indirectly influenced by the nationalism 
in the North. Indeed, the golden age of Polish 
and Serbian literature is but a century older than 
the rebirth of the Slavic idea in Bohemia. 

Again it was a Bohemian who, at the end of 
the eighteenth and in the beginning of the nine- 
teenth century, became the founder of Slavic 
philology and the new Slavic literary movements 
throughout Europe. Jagic begins his stupendous 
" Encyclopedia of Slavic Philology " with a defini- 
tion of Slavic philology, after which he says: 
" Only at the end of the eighteenth century did the 
whole volume of Slavic philology, as an independ- 
ent science, assume shape. The chief desert in this 
matter belongs to Joseph Dobrovsky. He laid 
the foundation for a scientific grammar of the 
Slavic languages, centering it on its most ancient 
type, the Church-Slavic. He was the first to at- 
tempt a determination of the degree of relation- 



THE SLAVIC REGENERATION 167 

ship between the separate Slavic dialects by means 
of a scientific classification. It was he who intro- 
duced into the circle of scientific interests the ques- 
tions from the literary and cultural history of the 
Slavs, for example, the question of the educational 
activity of Cyril and Methodius, and finally also 
from social history, such as archeological and 
ethnographical questions. . . . The critical spirit 
of Dobrovsky with his broad views has created 
Slavic philology. He is the father of this science." 
In the second half of the eighteenth century it 
looked as though the Slavic languages were doomed 
to perdition. Poland lost its independence and 
was parceled out among three nations; Bohemia 
had become a mere dependency of the Hapsburg 
Empire; Serbia and Bulgaria were under the Turk- 
ish yoke and did not even dream of a separate 
political existence. Nor did matters stand better in 
the national literatures. The Polish and Bohemian 
literatures led a vegetative existence; the Serbians 
and Croatians had forgotten of their literary 
past; the Bulgarians had not yet discovered the 
fact that they spoke an intelligible language worthy 
of literary refinement. Russia was still struggling 
with the establishment of a linguistic norm out of 
the ecclesiastic Slavic and the spoken idiom, while 
its literature was but a feeble reflex of French 
pseudo-classicism. Nowhere was there the slight- 



168 BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

est conviction that the homely native dialects had 
a right to exist by the side of the more fortunate 
German, while of the past of the Slavic languages 
but the faintest surmises had been uttered by men 
untutored in historical and philological lore. But 
if it was the preponderant influence of German 
culture that put the Slavic into the shade, it was 
also the result of German philosophy which gave 
the Slavic national idea a new lease of life. 

German literature had itself been decadent for 
some time, and was obliged to yield to the more 
universal French culture which ruled even at the 
Prussian court. The revolt against French pseudo- 
classicism and encyclopedism was, however, voiced 
by a few German writers who began to look in the 
native elements of the intellectual life for a basis 
for a native poetry and belles lettres in general. 
Thus arose the German Romanticism, which be- 
lieved that in the creations of the popular mind 
could be found truer, more natural sentiments for 
literary expression than in the artificial productions 
of a select upper class. Possibly the chief activity 
in the direction of a simpler literature was de- 
veloped by the brothers Grimm, who, by their col- 
lections of fairy tales and mythological lore, laid 
the foundation for a nationalistic movement which 
was soon to sweep over Europe. Not only did Ger- 
man literature successfully establish itself against 



THE SLAVIC REGENERATION 169 

the French fashion, but all the smaller nations, 
who had almost forgotten of their historical exist- 
ence, began to discover themselves. If the popular 
creation was truer and more important than the 
traditional literatures of the Grseco-Roman type, 
then Serbia and Bohemia and Russia, which had 
preserved an enormous mass of oral literature in 
out-of-the-way places, harked back to important 
pasts and should develop from within. The na- 
tionalistic idea began to grow out of proportion 
to the folklore which could conveniently be mus- 
tered in proof of native superiority, and where 
there was such a disproportion it became necessary, 
so unscrupulous nationalists thought, to manufac- 
ture such material. Everybody knows the huge 
literary forgery of Macpherson, whose Ossianic 
poetry none the less had a great influence upon sus- 
ceptible minds, even in the East. Another such 
forgery was that of the Bohemian Hanka, whose 
Queen's Court Manuscript still finds overzealous 
defenders among a certain class of unwise na- 
tionalists. It is not the forgery of Hanka which 
has had most widespread influences upon the dis- 
semination of the nationalistic idea among the 
Slavs, but the legitimate and scholarly activity of 
the father of Slavic philology, Joseph Dobrovsky. 
Having studied Eastern languages at the Uni- 
versity of Pragtie, he had hoped to become a mis- 



170 BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

sionary in India, but he soon abandoned this in- 
tention and devoted himself to the study of Slavic 
antiquity. In 1779 he made his appearance in 
criticism with a periodical which set itself the task 
of telling " the truth, the naked, unvarnished 
truth " without regard for persons. He at once 
attracted attention by his sharp, critical acumen. 
His main interest lay in the purification of the 
Cech language and the formation of a literary 
norm. In 1792 his desire to reconstruct the Slavic 
past took him on a long journey to the libraries of 
Sweden and Russia, and even to the Caucasus, 
where he had expected to find some indications of a 
Cech origin. In the same year appeared his " His- 
tory of the Bohemian Language and Literature," 
in which he described the struggles of the Cech 
language against the German and Latin from the 
time of Hus until his day, and showed what rela- 
tion it bore to the other Slavic languages. The 
effect of this work upon the nationalistic feeling 
was very great. Especially his grammar of the 
Cech language which he published in 1808 formed 
the basis for all Slavic grammars written in the 
first half of the nineteenth century, Dobrovsky 
was a voluminous writer, and his scientific cor- 
respondence, lately edited by Jagic, contains an 
immense amount of material which throws a light 
upon the history of the Slavic renasce;nce. 



THE SLAVIC REGENERATION 171 

Dobrovsky soon gained many disciples in the 
Slavic world. The Russians Vostokov, Kalay- 
dovich, Stroev, and many others, the Slovenes 
Kopitar and Vodnik v^ere his followers, and the 
great Slavists Safafik and Miklosich carried on 
the work of philology after him. He enjoyed 
the friendship of German scholars and poets, 
Goethe, Jacob Grimm, Pertz, and others. Goethe 
wrote of him : " Abbe Joseph Dobrovsky, the past 
master of critical historical science in Bohemia, 
this rare man who long before had followed the 
general study of the Slavic languages and his- 
tories with genial industry and Herodotic travels, 
rejoiced in reducing his gains to the study of the 
Bohemian people and country, and thus united 
with the greatest glory in science the rare reputa- 
tion of a popular name. The master is visible in 
whatever he attempts. He everywhere grasps his 
subject and deftly unites the fragments into one 
whole." 

It cannot be said that the strong nationalistic 
movement which developed in Bohemia was en- 
tirely beneficial, for it not only led to unhealthy, 
ecstatic moods in the Bohemian literature of the 
first part of the nineteenth century, but even to 
a series of literary falsifications which still form 
the subject of discussion among laymen. But it 
must not be forgotten that the Bohemian national- 



112 BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

ism was a reflex of the nascent German nationalism 
and was fanned to exaggerated manifestations by 
the obscurant absolutism of Emperor Francis I. 
Indeed, the Cech nationalism was to a great extent 
encouraged by the Austrian Government, as a pro- 
tective measure against Napoleonic sympathies. 
The work begun by Dobrovsky was carried into 
the field of literature by Jungmann, who was not 
satisfied with creating a native literary language 
for the lower classes only, which seemed sufficient 
to Dobrovsky, but set about to create a literary 
norm for the whole of the Bohemian people. 
Jungmann was especially successful in translating 
from foreign languages, and the Slovaks Safafik 
and Kollar, and the Moravian Palacky, not only 
imitated the activity of their teacher Jungmann, but 
became even more important in the dissemination 
of the Slavic idea, both at home and abroad. 

In the twenties of the nineteenth century the 
fame of these ardent Slavists had spread to all 
the Slavic countries, and in Russia the question 
of founding a chair of Slavic philology, to be oc- 
cupied by some Bohemian scholar, was seriously 
considered. In 1830 the Russian Government 
offered a chair of Slavic philology to Safafik, but 
nothing came of it, chiefly through the machina- 
tions of the forger Hanka, who sided with the 
Russian autocracy, while Safafik publicly ex- 



THE SLAVIC REGENERATION 173 

pressed himself in favor of the Poles in the revo- 
lution which had just broken out in Russia. But 
Safafik continued to exert a great influence on 
Slavic science in Russia through his friend 
Pogodin, who never gave up the hope that Safafik 
might be called to a chair in Petrograd. When 
this hope could not be materialized, the young 
Slavists then studying in Russia, Bodyanski, 
Sreznevski and others, made it their business to 
study for a time in Austria, more especially, to 
meet Safafik and learn something from personal 
contact with him. Indeed, the main activity of 
Bodyanski consisted in translating into Russian 
the works of Safafik and, other Bohemian Slavists. 
Similarly Sreznevski, in his inaugural lecture at 
the university, pointed out the fact that there had 
existed no interest in Slavic studies in Russia until 
such had been created by the Bohemian and Ser- 
bian scholars. As Bodyanski stood in relation to 
the Russian Slavophiles, it is certain that the 
Slavophile movement in Russia received some of 
its ideas directly or indirectly from the Bohe- 
mian nationalists. 

From the humble beginnings in the first part of 
the nineteenth century Bohemian literature has 
developed in a remarkable manner, borrowing 
what is best in all literatures, and to a consider- 
able extent falling under the influence of the great 



174 BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

Russian writers. It is eminently cosmopolitan in 
compass and subject-matter, but at the same time 
has preserved many national characteristics, which 
would well repay the interest of an English read- 
ing public, if it could be induced to read transla- 
tions of this almost unknown literature. Its 
poetry is especially attractive and varied, and the 
poets have reveled in the discussion of those social 
problems which elsewhere have been relegated to 
the field of prose. 

Whatever the interest of the outsider may be in 
Bohemian literature, it deserves the highest atten- 
tion on the part of the Slavs, who owe their very 
regeneration to the labors of the Bohemian 
scholars a century ago. If, in addition, we con- 
sider what Bohemia did for freedom of re- 
ligious thought a hundred years before the days 
of Luther, and still more, the great obligation 
under which the Greek Catholic Church is to Bo- 
hemia for its very ecclesiastic language and na- 
tional alphabets, the sympathies of the world 
should particularly be enlisted for this country in 
the possible future reconstruction of the Austrian 
Empire. Slavs and non-Slavs should unite on this 
point without discussion, and even the Germans 
should look favorably on the restoration of Bo- 
hemia to its former freedom and glory, if they are 
not blinded by selfishness and useless conceit. 



THE SLAVIC REGENERATION 175 

Bohemia has in the Middle Ages been the mediator 
between the West and the East, the South and the 
North, and it will for a long time remain the 
mediator between the best German thought and the 
growing Slavic civilization, if the Germans do not, 
as in the past, rouse the Slavic antipathies. Of all 
the Slavs, the Bohemians understood the German 
ideas best, and Dobrovsky and other Bohemian 
Slavists promoted the Slavic idea by means of 
the German language. That, of course, can never 
happen again, for the nationalist life is there 
permanently established. But there is no reason 
for racial antagonism in a country where Ger- 
mans and Slavs have lived together for centuries. 



ADDENDA 

THE BOHEMIANS AS IMMIGRANTS 

By Emily Greene Balch, Professor of Eco- 
nomics AT Wellesley College * 

N some cities, as for instance Cedar Rapids, 
and in some states, as for instance Nebraska, 
Bohemians are a large enough element in the 
population to be fairly well known; but they are 
not so numerous in the United States as a whole, 
as to be clearly present to the minds of most people. 
New Yorkers may have seen with interest the 
National Hall of the Bohemians, Clevelanders 
may be familiar with the Schauffler Missionary 
Training School, persons familiar with industrial 
conditions in Chicago may be aware of the great 
Bohemian colony there, the largest in the country ; 
but in general if people know anything about Bo- 
hemians they probably " know a great many things 
that aren't so," misled by the fact that the French 
word for Gipsies is Bohemians, much as our word 
for the American aborigines is Indian. 

Yet from the colonial period individual Bohe- 

* Author of " Our Slavic Fellow-Citizens." Miss Balch studied the 
Slav in the United States and " at the source," in Europe. 

176 



BOHEMIANS AS IMMIGRANTS 177 

mians have come to this country, and in 1906, the 
latest year for which I have estimates, the Bo- 
hemian group was put at a round half-million. 

Some of these early settlers are picturesque and 
not unimportant figures like Herman and Phillipse, 
but it was not till the disturbed period of 1848 that 
Bohemians came to this country in appreciable 
numbers. At this time there was a triple ferment 
in Bohemia: first, a desire for political independ- 
ence; second, a resurrection of national self-con- 
sciousness symbolized by the revival of the 
Bohemian language, the use of which among cul- 
tivated people had been abandoned for German; 
and third, a spirit of religious questioning and 
vehement challenge of current Christianity, largely 
due to reaction against the influence of a corrupt 
Austrian clericalism. 

Another possible influence was the discovery of 
gold in California in 1849, which is said to have 
brought Bohemian gold-seekers and to have stimu- 
lated the activity of ship agents. The census of 
1850 mentions 87 natives of Austria (out of 946 
in the United States) as then in California; these 
were probably Bohemians. Throughout the fifties 
and early sixties there was a pretty steady outflow 
from Bohemia, most of it directed to the United 
States. This early emigration was a movement of 
settlers, whole families going together. 



178 BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

With 1867 came a fresh impulse to emigration. 
Besides the newly granted right to emigrate freely, 
the disastrous war with Prussia in 1866 gave added 
reasons for going, while in the United States the 
Civil War was over and everything invited the 
settler. 

The earliest colony of Bohemians was in St. 
Louis, where in 1854 they had already established 
a Catholic church, and this city has always re- 
mained an influential Bohemian centre. 

More important, however, was the movement to 
the states further West — the largest numbers set- 
tling in Wisconsin, later Iowa, later Nebraska 
and the two Dakotas, though a considerable settle- 
ment also grew up in Cleveland. In general, how- 
ever, in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois land was 
already too dear for the newcomers, and they con- 
tinually settled further west as the years went on. 
In the early days they either went overland from 
the Eastern ports or up the Mississippi River. 
One of the reasons for so many Bohemians as well 
as Germans, Scandinavians, Poles, and Belgians 
being attracted to Wisconsin was undoubtedly the 
attitude of that state toward immigration. A fact 
that is easily forgotten in the present state of feeling 
in regard to immigration is the eager and official 
solicitation of immigrants that was carried on for 
years by various states. Wisconsin, like many 



BOHEMIANS AS IMMIGRANTS 179 

other states, appointed a Commissioner of Immi- 
gration to stimulate the inflow. In 1852 the first 
man to fill this office reported to the Governor 
that he had been in New York distributing pam- 
phlets in English, German, Norwegian, and Dutch, 
describing the resources of the state. 

After four years this state canvass for immi- 
grants was suspended for a time, but in 1864 the 
Wisconsin Legislature memorialized Congress for 
the passage of national laws to encourage foreign 
immigration on the ground that labor was scarce, 
owing to the war, and that wages had more than 
doubled. Whether or not as a consequence of 
this request. Congress did in the same year pass 
an act to encourage immigration, which, however, 
was repealed ir^ March, 1868. 

Again, in 1879, Wisconsin established a State 
Board of Immigration to increase and stimulate 
immigration, with authority to disseminate infor- 
mation. The official circulars mentioned as in- 
ducements the following points: climate, rich 
lands at a nominal price, free schools and a free 
university, equality before the law, religious lib- 
erty, no imprisonment for debt, and liberal ex- 
emption from seizure by a creditor, suffrage and 
the right to be elected to any office but that of 
governor or lieutenant-governor on one year's 
residence, whether a citizen or not (intention to 



180 BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

become one having been declared) ; and full eligi- 
bility to office for all actual citizens. " There is 
never an election in the state," one circular con- 
tinues, " that does not put some, and often very 
many, foreign-born citizens into office. Indeed, 
there is no such thing as a foreigner in Wisconsin, 
save in the mere accident of birthplace; for men 
coming here and entering into the active duties of 
life identify themselves with the state and her 
interests, and are to all intents and purposes 
American." We are told " The language above 
used is, except in rhetoric, identical " with that in 
an edition of 1884. 

Besides this direct encouragement by the state 
" a similar canvass was maintained by counties and 
land companies, and at a later stage by railway 
companies, some of them sending agents to travel 
in Europe." Of such solicitation at the very be- 
ginning of Bohemian immigration I found tradi- 
tion still mindful in the old country. Thus 
immigrants have felt themselves directly and offi- 
cially invited and urged to come, and it is not 
surprising that one often finds them aggrieved 
and hurt at the tone of too many current refer- 
ences making foreigners synonymous with every- 
thing that is unwelcome. 

Many of the Bohemians were pioneers in the 
unbroken wilderness, and a very large part were 



BOHEMIANS AS IMMIGRANTS 181 

farmers. A large proportion, however, had trades, 
and this is characteristic of Bohemian immigra- 
tion in general. The common estimate is that one- 
half of the Bohemians in the country are living 
in country places, occupied either with farming 
or with some one of the various employments in- 
cident to rural life, from shoemaking to keeping 
store or acting as notary public. If the compari- 
son be extended to all groups of foreign parentage, 
Bohemia shows a larger proportion engaged in 
agriculture than any foreign countries except 
Switzerland, Denmark, and Norway, surpassing 
even Germany and Sweden. It is interesting to 
note that Italy has a very low rank in this regard ; 
even Poland and Russia surpass her, lowered as 
their place is by the large non-agricultural Jewish 
element, and only Hungary is below her. 

As to the quality of Slavic farming, one natu- 
rally hears different reports. I suspect that the 
American often thinks the Pole or Bohemian a 
poor farmer because he works on a different plan, 
while the foreigner, used to small, intensive farm- 
ing, thinks Yankees slovenly and wasteful. Espe- 
cially when he takes up old, worn-out farm lands, 
he has small respect for the methods of his prede- 
cessor, who, he says, " robbed the soil." 

The American business agent of a Bohemian 



182 BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

farming paper, already quoted, could not say 
enough in praise of the Bohemian farmers. They 
farmed better than the Americans. They invested 
freely in farm machinery. Nothing was too good 
or too big for them. In the eastern half of Butler 
County, Nebraska, there were seventeen big 
steam threshing outfits among Bohemians — some- 
thing to which you could find nothing parallel in 
the same area anywhere in the United States. The 
Bohemian paper of which he was agent had seven 
times more advertising of farm implements 
than any other paper in the United States, he 
said. 

While the above statements are those of an in- 
terested party, all the available evidence points the 
same way. It would seem, moreover, as though 
in certain lines, new to us and familiar in Europe, 
the immigrant should be able to supply very valu- 
able skill. This seems to be especially the case 
in the sugar-beet industry, in which the labor of 
Bohemians, who understand beet culture well, is 
much sought. 

Of Bohemian women at work, nearly a quarter 
were in 1900 servants and waitresses, and more 
than another quarter workers at tailoring or in to- 
bacco. This corresponds to the fact that many 
Bohemians in the cities are engaged in the two 
latter branches; many too are mechanics or trades- 



BOHEMIANS AS IMMIGRANTS 183 

people, often carrying on a small business of their 
own. 

The Bohemians, like other Slavic groups in this 
country, are much given to organizing into socie- 
ties. Many of their associations are small local 
affairs of the most various sorts. In a New York 
Bohemian paper I found a list of 95 local societies 
among this group of perhaps 45,000 people. 
Many were mere " pleasure clubs," to use the cur- 
rent East Side phrase, while many were lodges of 
various of their great "national" societies. Of 
these large national societies the most remarkable 
is the society founded by the Bohemians at St. 
Louis in 1854, under the name of the Bohemian- 
Slavonic Benevolent Society, or as it is commonly 
called, by the initials of this name in the vernacu- 
lar, the C. S. P. S. In the religious controversies 
which soon divided American Bohemians into two 
camps, this came to represent the free-thinking, 
anti-Catholic side. It numbers about 25,000 
members. 

The Sokols, which correspond to the German 
" Turnerbunds " or gymnastic societies, are as 
popular and widespread as they are desirable. 
They give opportunity for exercise dignified by 
a sense of the relation between good physical con- 
dition and readiness for service to one's country. 
Women and children, as well as the men, have 



184 BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

their own divisions, classes, and uniforms, and the 
Sokol exhibitions are important and very pretty 
social events. In Prague, in the summer of 1906, 
the Bohemian Sokols had an anniversary interna- 
tional meet, at which the American societies were 
also represented, and performed evolutions, liter- 
ally in their thousands, in the open air. 

Theatricals, whether given in some local hall or 
in a regular theatre hired for the occasion, are, as 
in Europe, a favorite employment for Sunday 
afternoons or evenings. Classic pieces, both liter- 
ary and operatic, are much enjoyed; for instance, 
among the Bohemians, Smetana's opera, " The 
Bartered Bride," is often given. On the other 
hand, one will see a very simple spontaneous little 
exhibition given with the greatest abandon and 
delight by a club of hard-worked, elderly women, 
whose triumphs are hugely enjoyed by their fami- 
lies and neighbors. It is an especial pleasure to 
them to reproduce the pretty costumes of their 
old-world youth. Worthy of especial mention are 
the club called Snaha (Endeavor), of Bohemian 
professional women in Chicago, and the clubs or- 
ganized for reading and study among Socialists 
of different nationalities. 

There are numerous Bohemian papers and 
periodicals, including the Bohemian " Hospodaf " 
(" Farmer ") of Omaha and the " 2enske Listy " 



BOHEMIANS AS IMMIGRANTS 185 

of Chicago, the latter being an organ of a woman's 
society, printed as well as edited by women. It 
is not devoted to "beauty lessons" and "house- 
hold hints," but to efforts toward woman's suffrage 
and the " uplifting of the mental attitude of work- 
ing-women." Its 6,000 subscribers include dis- 
tinguished Bohemians all over the country, men 
as well as women. 

In religion the Roman Catholics claim a large 
number of Bohemians, but there is a substantial 
Protestant minority; outside the church fold is the 
numerous and very interesting group of Free- 
Thinkers. 

The Bohemians are among the most literate of 
our immigrants. Taking the data for 1900, which 
I happen to have worked out, we find that of im- 
migrants of all nationalities of fourteen years 
and over, those not able to both read and write 
were 24.2 per cent. ; among the Germans 5.8 per 
cent. ; among the Bohemians and Moravians only 
3.0 per cent. ; among Scandinavians, under 0.8 
per cent. Certainly to supply only about one-half 
as many illiterates per hundred as the Germans is 
a notable record. 

All of this is quite borne out by the impression 
one gets of Bohemians both in the United States 
and in Bohemia. In development and conditions 
they rank with the immigrant from northwestern 



186 BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS 

Europe. The struggle with the Germans is in a 
sense the master-thread in their whole history, and 
this contact, even though inimical, has meant inter- 
penetration and rapprochement. No other Slavic 
nationality is more self-conscious and patriotic, not 
to say chauvinistic, in its national feeling, and at 
the same time none begins to be so permeated with 
general European culture and so advanced eco- 
nomically. 

As to character, if it is impossible to indict a 
whole people, so is it impossible to draw a portrait 
of such a collective group. Nevertheless, no one 
can doubt that one characteristic of the country- 
men of Smetana and Dvorak is their noble gift 
for music. Their sense of color, too, is very 
marked, and they, beyond all people I know, love 
the dance. Yet with all their "gemiithlich" and 
temperamental qualities I find them reserved, 
delicate, shy, intensely family-loving, cherishing 
privacy. 

The Bohemians are a people of high conscien- 
tiousness, and by nature loyal. In the Civil War 
their anti-slavery feeling and their devotion to 
their new country both were shown, and the first 
company that went from Chicago to fight for the 
Union is said to have been a Lincoln Rifle Com- 
pany that some young men of that nationality had 
organized in i860. The dominating feature in the 



BOHEMIANS AS IMMIGRANTS 187 

great Bohemian National Cemetery in Chicago is 
the soldiers' monument, just such a monument as 
stands on every village common in New England ; 
and perhaps nothing so much as this visible sign of 
blood shed in the same cause bridges the difference 
of national feeling. 

They are interested in ideas for their own sake, 
as are the Latin peoples, and especially In ques- 
tions of religion. The older people love their past, 
their language, their old home, yet they cannot 
hand on these interests in their pristine intensity 
to the younger people, absorbed in the life about 
them, dropping their Bohemian speech and ways 
and gradually, only gradually, completing the 
transition to the New World and its ways. 

Note. — I have to thank the publishers of my book, Our 
Slavic Fellow-Citisens, for permission to borrow here and 
there from its pages. 



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H 100 89 



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